We leave Hawaii for Michigan. This should be a straightforward 11-hour redeye transfer of our fleshly vessels from the middle of the Pacific to the middle of the country, but we complicate it with a short stop in California. After living half the year in the most isolated spot on earth, we push pause before re-entry to mainland society. I’d call it a liminal space but there’s nothing remotely eerie or spiritual or mysterious about this transition. It’s a just pleasant pit stop between one beautiful place and another.

As we drive down the coast of California, bright blue sky disappears into a haze. Fog or fire? we wonder. Probably just marine layer, Husband says.

I don’t know what he’s talking about. I thought Marine Layer was the name of the place where I got my Kyra Poplin Barrell Pants, an elastic-waist garment that still fits when none of the others do.

Husband is shocked but not surprised by my lack of common knowledge. After all I only recently found out exactly where Connecticut was, and I’m still not sure what the difference is between Wyoming and Montana. Generally I know where I am and I know where I’ve been, and every other place exists in an amorphous state on a continent I might be able to identify.

Husband explains that the marine layer is a thin mass of clouds on coastal areas caused by the difference in temperature between the ocean and the air above it. After a half hour of driving, the haze breaks up and we’re back to that beautiful brand of California light.

On our second flight, to Michigan, a bald man with spotless leather sneakers and a nice watch is sitting in my assigned seat, an aisle seat. From the way he looks up at me when I ask him to relinquish his 17 x 33-inch kingdom, I know instantly that the man is a classic Baby King. Naturally he throws a controlled conniption. He believes me when I say the seat is mine, but he can’t believe it! The airline must have changed his seat! Or his assistant made a mistake because he “always has an aisle seat, never a window.” The woman next to him, his girlfriend or wife or business partner, tries to calm him down. “Are you going to be okay?” she says firmly.

The Detroit airport, like LAX, feels like a giant sealed cage with tunnels and chutes and walkways for mobs of stressed humans to scurry along in the hopes of getting to an exit. Kauai’s airport, by contrast, is an indoor-outdoor space with warm breezes flowing through and palm trees just on the other side of a volcanic rock wall.

Ahead of me a young guy with a leashed dog waits as the dog raises his haunches and drops two turds on the polished terrazo floor. When the dog is done, the guy moves forward as if nothing happened. Can you believe that? I say to Husband. Husband shrugs. I can’t believe that, I say, louder, hoping the guy will hear. You are not the doo-doo police, Husband responds. When I pass the guy a short time later, I give him the Glare of Glares anyway. Under the shadow of his baseball cap, he smirks.

Mainlanders, pssht. No kuleana, just me, me, me.

[Let me interject that I do not actually think all mainlanders are jerks. Understand that I am in a travel funk and looking for reasons to stay in it. Moping over good fortune is not a good look, I know.]

Chores await me in northern Michigan—so much cleaning and weeding and planting to open the house back up—but for today I choose only one chore, grocery shopping. This usually dreaded trip allows me to wander anonymously and alone, to drift through the warehouse like fog.

Too many choices make the shopping take longer. On island there are only a few different brands, and because everything is brought in on a barge on Tuesday, by the weekend choices are even more limited. It makes life simpler if occasionally frustrating.

I come across an old lady in the bottled water aisle. She’s looking at a six-pack of Smart Water, trying to read the label. I’m so mixed up about water, she says. Me too, I say, but I’m not thinking about water, I’m thinking about being mixed up.

I begin a carrot cake for a family gathering. The recipe is from Husband’s Aunt Joann, and I always feel connected to her when I bake it. I set out of a sheet of waxed paper on the counter to peel carrots. Usually I just peel carrots directly into the trashcan, so I’m not sure why I’m taking this extra step. I seem to be doing everything slowly and deliberately. Blame the jet lag. Blame my innate sense of drama.

Anyway, peeling carrots is therapeutic, the way each long sliver loops gracefully onto the waxed paper. Aunt Joann is at my side, and now my mother is too. I picture her sitting at the kitchen table, waxed paper in front of her, peeling potato after potato. I feel her good sense, her cheerfulness, her fortitude. I tear up. I miss her suddenly, even after all these years she’s been gone. The past wells up like another place I’ve left behind, a different country I can’t return to but can never move on from.

A third presence makes itself known—poet Seamus Heaney—sitting with his mother peeling potatoes. Later I will look up the last lines of “While the Others Were at Mass” to see the exact words as he wrote them:

I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

I strip the rest of the carrots of their earthy coverings and throw the mound away.

I hug everyone hello. It’s nice. People ask, Are you glad to be home? It’s a pleasantry, not a serious question. The simple answer is yes. Just say yes, Maggie. Y-E-S. Yes, it is great to be back! It’s so good to see you! Instead I give a overly-long answer about how I miss my life in Kauai and I just love the ocean and the humidity and our simple life, but sure, I did miss people, I missed family. Which could be construed as insulting or insufferable to present company.

I tell myself to stop processing out loud. In a few days all will be well. The marine layer will clear, as it always does, and there’ll be sunshine aplenty. By the end of the year my allegiance will be to this new place and these new faces, and I will be sad to leave them behind too.

Margaret, are you grieving?
Why yes, I am. 
Over golden beaches you're leaving?
No. Not just the beach. It's all the change, so much change. 
Ah! ás the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder—
Exactly. Who knows what terrible things might happen before I return next year? 
And yet you will weep and know why.
Yes. I’ll be that much older. It’s all going too fast.
It is the blight man was born for
Women too. It ends for all of us—
It is Margaret that you mourn for.

*

Addendum

“Spring and Fall to a Young Child” has always belonged to me, and not just because Hopkins addresses the poem to a girl with my name. When I was little, my older sister Annie had to memorize the poem for school, and thereafter she’d recite it dramatically when she saw me, which I loved. One Christmas she also decoupaged the poem on a piece of wood as a gift.

Spring and Fall to a Young Child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for. 

*

Speaking of poems, here’s an old favorite about another in-between place. (If there’s a child nearby, read it out loud.)

Halfway Down
by A. A. Milne

Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn't any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I'm not at the bottom,
I'm not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where
I always
Stop.

Halfway up the stairs
Isn't up
And it isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery,
It isn't in town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head.
It isn't really
Anywhere!
It's somewhere else
Instead!

*

In 2015, Seamus Heaney’s “While The Others Were Away At Mass” was voted Ireland’s most beloved poem of the last century. Here’s Irish actor Aaron Monaghan reading it.

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I’m old enough to remember how sci-fi fans used to count the days for the next Star Wars release and the frenzy tweenagers went into over a new Harry Potter book. I’m also old enough to rarely feel frenzied about much of anything (the benefit and downside of age-related perspective), but my wait for the Britbox original series The Other Bennet Sister came close. “CAN. NOT. WAIT.,” I texted my brother. The first three episodes of the ten-episode series finally dropped in the U.S., and I can report that it’s met my hopes in many ways and only fell short in a few.

The show focuses on overlooked Mary Bennet of Pride and Prejudice’s Bennet family. In the original source, Jane Austen portrays Mary as plain, serious, priggish, sermonizing, and unpleasant. She’s the buzz-kill and butt of jokes in every scene she’s in. The new series re-imagines her as a lovable misfit. She still has her signature lack of social skills—somehow she thinks it’s a good idea to sing the dolorous “Begone, Dull Care” at the Netherfield Ball—but in the re-boot she is also keenly aware of her shortcomings and lack of prospects. After her father asks her to end her awful performance, her public humiliation is heartbreaking. I cried over it, and anyone who’s suffered similar youthful agonies may well do the same.

The show isn’t perfect. The soundtrack is intrusive and too Hallmark-y. Mrs. Bennet (the wonderful Ruth Jones who was unforgettable as Nessa in Gavin and Stacey) has become a heavy-handed villain rather than the hypochondriacal, silly woman Austen wrote her to be.

But the lead actress, Mary Ella Bruccoleri! I adore her. I adore her square face. I love her round, wide-set eyes, her little spectacles, her short bangs, her very ordinary nose that she squinches when she’s confused. Unlike other Austen or period-piece heroines, her face and neck are not Modigliani-esque. No chiseled features here unless she was sculpted on Easter Island.

She doesn’t flirt—she wouldn’t know how—but as she begins to take up more space in the world, her own idiosyncratic charm becomes irresistible to viewers and to the show’s male characters alike. The way the color spreads through her cheeks while she observes a man roll up his sleeve on his muscular forearm is the sexiest scene I’ve watched in ages.

Per an interview in the New York Times, Bruccoleri’s been surprised at how popular her character has become in Britain where the show is a huge hit:

It shouldn’t be rare to see “a normal-looking person” onscreen, she said, but “a lot of people, I think, feel very validated by seeing someone that isn’t a supermodel” leading a TV show.

Later in the interview she says this:

“I learned a lesson through playing Mary,” Bruccoleri said, which echoes what her character discovers: “The more I can embrace my authenticity, rather than trying to fit myself into a box that other female actors inhabit,” then “the better off I will be.”

I hate to beat a dead horse (Husband would contend I actually love to beat a dead horse), but as I wrote in Issue # 57, we are in dire need of more interesting and more un-enhanced faces on screen.

Cheers to you, Mary Bennet!

*

One More Paradiddle on My Dead Horse

Let’s turn to another oddball who also embraced her authenticity, much to the literary world’s benefit. Emily Bronte, singular, misanthropic, and unconcerned with how other people perceived her, very briefly taught at a girls’ school in Brussels. Her pupils did not like her. (In fairness, she scheduled lessons at her own convenience which was unfortunately during their limited free time.)

Here’s how her pupil Laetitia Wheelwright described her:

“I simply disliked her from the first; her tallish, ungainly, ill-dressed figure. . . always answering our jokes with ‘I wish to be as God made me’.”

Oh my goodness. Even as a woman who religiously colors her hair and slaps on neck-tightening cream whenever she looks in the mirror, I have mad respect for a woman who can say such a thing. The power of it!

Someday I’ll say it too. I wish to be as God made me!

*

Decadence, Thy Name Is Elf Ears

Look, I am a big fan of elves. I love their mischievousness, their trickery, their hiddenness. I love Dobby, I love Hermey, I love Moql from The Moorchild, I love the elves of Middle Earth, I love the elves who made boots for the shoemaker, I love Buddy the Elf, I love the Icelandic culture of elves, I love the tchotchke elves I own. I even called myself “Poem Elf” for many years when I wrote a blog of the same name. The only elf I don’t like is the one on the shelf.

But the latest elf trend in South Korea—and please God, let it spread no further—is too much for me.

To wit: People are spending $70 to inject their ears with filler to make them stick out like elf ears. Supposedly this makes your face look smaller. Previously the look was attained by using painful tape.

The insanity of this trend speaks for itself. No further comment is necessary.

*

Burnout, Thy Name Is —

I just learned a new phrase for burnout. I was listening to an interview with Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren called “Your Burnout May Be an Invitation.” In an offhand fashion and without trying to make a huge point about it, she gave burnout a new name: “a season of weariness.” It really struck me. A season of weariness implies that the condition is temporary and can be weathered through.

That’s just one small insight from a really insightful No Small Endeavor podcast episode—listening to it on a walk I couldn’t take notes fast enough—until I realized the notes have already been taken in the podcast transcript. I’ll share a few excerpts with you and encourage you to listen to the episode in its entirety.

Warren’s message is encouraging but counter cultural. Our culture, she says, is “addicted to ease but really, really lacking in meaning.” Doing the hard work instead of falling back into what’s convenient allows us to find deep roots and of course, meaning:

Patience, perseverance, resilience. As a culture, these are not virtues we talk about a lot. They’re not very sexy. . . They’re not as cool as other virtues like courage or justice. And I just wanted to make space for the need for these in our culture and what it would look like to cultivate them.

Warren and host Lee C. Camp discuss the Benedict-ian idea that, “if a trial comes upon you in the place where you live, do not leave that place. Wherever you go, you find that what you were running from is ahead of you.” Warren illustrates the point with a story about one the ancient Desert Fathers and Mothers.

And so there’s this great story that actually didn’t make the book of a monk that was living in community and struggled so much with anger.

And so everyone around him was just irritating him. And so he decided to be a hermit. So he left his community so that he would be free of anger.

And he was by himself in a cave, and he went to get water, had to walk a long way to get water, came back. And when he did, he stumbled, and the water basin tipped over and the water poured out. And he got so angry, he kicked it and broke it.

And he said, at that moment, he realized, because he was all alone, he realized the anger was not because of other people, but the anger was inside himself. So he picked up and went back and lived with the community that he had loved.

Later she talks about the under-valued value of patience:

The word for patience in Arabic comes from the same root as the word to be confined. And there’s something about these sorts of confinements of our life, which is where patience begins to grow.

And I think with patience comes love. I mean, because ultimately, I think love is patience.

*

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When I was a mother of young children and living in a closely-knit community of many other mothers of young children, our neighborhood babysitting co-op hosted a night of women sharing tips with each other on raising kids, meal preparation, and cleaning the house. These days such tips would be called hacks and you’d find them on Instagram. (And also—these days husbands would be invited too.)

Anyway, as the evening went on, the tip-sharing began to feel competitive. This mother had a great routine for school lunch-making; that one for storing her children’s artwork; another for getting her kids to eat vegetables. It reached peak absurdity when one mother recommended everyone follow her trick for getting the baseboards dusted: she placed quarters here and there along the baseboards so that her young boys would be motivated to keep moving forward along the floor.

I’m not sure if mothers left that night feeling energized to try new ideas or demoralized that they didn’t clean their baseboards on the regular and that their children didn’t do enough household chores.

Looking back, I’d say we young mothers were competitive because we were a little insecure and very overwhelmed. That’s probably more true today, given how much parenting instruction and contradictory parenting instruction there is online. Fortunately we mellow as we age. Amongst the mothers of adult children I know, there’s sympathy and curiosity for each other, but no sense of I-did-it-better-than-you. Because at this point we’ve all had a heartbreak or two; moreover we understand the limits of our efforts in the face of biology and circumstance.

It’s because I don’t know any mother without regrets that I undertook a survey for this Mother’s Day edition of Restless Egg. I asked a group of seasoned mothers a question: What’s something you’ve done as a mother that you’re proud of? I stipulated that this thing didn’t have to be profound, that small successes were worth sharing too.

Not surprisingly, many of the mothers said the question was challenging. Much easier to come up with mistakes than triumphs. (Note to the adult children of these mothers: it’s not that we are disappointed in you; we are disappointed in ourselves, and quite rightly we don’t give ourselves sole credit for how wonderful we think you are.)

There’s a wide range of responses here, each one an insight into the wide range of children these mothers produced. I know almost all of these women personally, and I can attest to the fact that each answer is true to the person they are. The woman who loves cleanliness and order is proud of passing that on to her children; the one who loves adventure tried to instill that in her own brood. Thank goodness mothers are all different from each other! What a dull world if everyone were the same.

One final thought: it’s possible these reflections will inspire younger mothers to try something new, but that’s not why I collected them. I wanted older mothers give themselves a break; to consider the good they’ve done; to pat themselves on the back. If there’s any inspiration to be found here for younger mothers, it’s my hope they see the value in being fully themselves for their families. To share one’s authentic self with one’s children— with all the accompanying talents, shortcomings, interests., temperaments, dreams, and beliefs—is a great gift and lays out a path for children to be their true selves as well.

Joan D:

I tried to not encourage my childrens’ fears and used humor to diffuse them. For example, I drove them to Washington, DC from NY when they were about 11, 13, and 15. As we drove into the city, some teenagers started yelling at the car and threatening us, and my kids were freaked out. I just laughed and said, “Welcome to Washington, DC!” They had to laugh too. And when they thought they had a “life-threatening” disease, I tried to find the humor in the situation, not always to their satisfaction!

Lynn R:

I played music and sang with both my kids from infancy on. They both love and are terrific at music and math . . . which is somehow connected.

Anne B:

My husband and I made sure to show our daughters how to travel! Gave them passports and plane tickets. Exposed them to new lands, new people and places. Had them listening to other languages. Traveled out of the country as a family when they were young—school aged—and ALWAYS made them carry their own luggage and belongings. Today as grown women they know what to do. They are not afraid to go alone and adventure to places near and far.

Brigette M:

I’m proud of tapping into each child’s interest or quirky behavior. For example. . . oldest: trips to dollar store to pick out a new glass animal (she’s an animal lover); 2^nd kid: toys/lego sets related to space (he’s an astrophysicist); 3rd: let her act like at a kitty cat around the house (she loves her pet cats more than anything); and 4th: [endorsed him using] all his First Communion money to buy books at the school book fair (he worked in a library after college).

I know these are probably just luck, but I am proud anyway.

Pam C:

I made it a point to try and listen to their thoughts, feelings and needs as they grew up. They still share their days with me when they want and have time to. I treasure those moments.

Mary B:

One thing is buying books and reading to my kids every night especially Harry Potter.

To this day my son’s love of reading started with those books (and his having dyslexic—it was inspiring!) Thank you, J. K Rowling!

Carolyn F:

Something I’ve instilled for which I am proud is the value of family traditions. Whether that be the tradition of eating meals together, celebration traditions, vacation traditions. . . The traditions generated a rhythm to our family story. And you know me. . . I love anything with a good rhythm!

Mary Margaret H:

Oldest of six was 8-years old, dad out of town. He (six-year old J) came to the dinner table without a shirt. I told him to put a shirt on.

J: I’m a guy and don’t need to wear a shirt.

Me: Go put a shirt on.

J goes upstairs.

After waiting a few minutes I followed him to see if he put a shirt on.

Mom and J meet mid-way on steps. Shirtless J. Mom rips off her shirt wearing bra and says, “No one is wearing a shirt tonight.”

J. says nothing as he looks very uncomfortable at mom and he goes and puts shirt on.

Dinner is successful.

T was turning three and had to be potty trained to go to preschool. On his birthday he said, “I will wear big boy underwear when I turn four.”

I waited 2 weeks, and his five siblings and I walked into his bedroom with a lit candle on a cupcake singing happy birthday. He thought he was four.

He used the big boy potty that day and ever since!

Cindy G:

I gave them the encouragement to go out of state to college. Not being able to come home every weekend created great confidence and independence and taught them to value family time.

Michele D:

When I’m with my girls especially, say we haven’t sat down to lunch in a while, I ask them, “Is there anything you want to ask me?” “Anything you’re curious about?” My intention is to be honest with them about myself, the good and the imperfect.

Mary K. S:

One thing specific to my son was noticing in 5th grade that he wasn’t doing well in school and was not motivated and was bored—and then acting on transferring him to a school that lit his curiosity and love of learning.

For the girls—sticking to the decision to send them to single-sex high school even though they were unhappy with the decision. . . but letting them know if it didn’t work then they could transfer the following year. They didn’t want to transfer then.

I was always scared to make tough decisions, and these were for us.

Renee R:

I don’t have a “big” parenting milestone to brag about, but the fact that my adult children still voluntarily come over to spend time with us, is testament of all those years stressing the importance of family.

Barb C:

I would send “curated” care packages to my girls all through college and while living away from home. If they had a roommate, extra treats were included. The package almost always included double-stuffed Oreos and Sour Patch Kids and also socks, love notes, gift cards, old photos, all the fav snacks. [Barb’s daughter B elaborates on these creative packages] B: “They were special because they were usually a surprise. Like they didn’t just center around birthdays, it could’ve been any Tuesday and they would arrive!. . . I do remember you sending me two different pairs of undies once, and you wrapped the lacy ones with a note that said ‘for your good days’ and the others ‘for the not so good days’ which you also packed with a box of tampons lol.”

When the girls lived together and we started using FaceTime, they’d wait and open the package in front of us which made for great entertainment plus they’d guess which item belonged to which sister. I truly was as excited to pack and send the boxes as they were to receive them.

Anne O:

Taught kids to speak for themselves at a young age. Wanted them to have a voice at the table and to encourage confidence, independence and decision making. Proud that these skills have helped them with effective communications and self-advocacy. (Not wanting to have meek, indecisive children backfired on me sometimes!)

Amy F:

Here are a few “little” things I’m proud of—

We always had music playing—danced in the kitchen, danced together whenever, wherever . . . music and dancing is such a mutually shared joy. They are great dancers.

They both have quick wits and appreciate laughing. I was always doing bits/voices to make them laugh—I was not afraid to be goofy in public. We constantly quote funny lines from movies to each other. Again, I think laughing is pure, shared joy.

Lastly, and most importantly. . . They are deep thinkers and care deeply for their friends—great listeners and very loyal. They both are sensitive, empathetic souls.

Michelle V:

As the mother of three boys, I am most proud that I was able to show them the importance of family, especially their friendships as brothers. Watching them do things together and keeping in touch on the “brother’s text group” is the best.

On a different level, I am glad that I was able to teach them the joy of cooking by allowing them to make things in our kitchen at an early age. Today, I especially like when they ask for my recipes or share one of theirs. And I am proud to have taught them the basics like putting the toilet seat down, cleaning up their dishes, and doing their laundry. And of course, saying thank you.

Denise D:

Spent three weeks with every family after each baby came home. Got up in the middle of the night. Made dinner and did laundry. Everyone still talks about how great that was. Makes you, as a mother and grandmother, feel good. Plus I really bonded with all of my grandchildren.

Bridget V:

When our kids went off to college, I encouraged them to stay in touch with their grandparents and suggested calling in-between classes. I’d often hear from my parents when those calls happened. Years later, they still reach out to their [remaining] grandmother, usually on their way to or from work.

Lynne B:

The one thing that popped into my mind was when kids (four of them) were small, I took a job at Winchells Donuts in Kansas City to make extra money we needed on our tight budget. I got up at 3 a.m. to get there so I could be home by 8 to get them to school. I lasted a whole two-three weeks. But made huge impression on all the kids and they still reference it! I believe they thought it was so we could go on summer vacation. Also they were the happy recipients of all the donuts I messed up.

Maureen H:

When my third daughter C was in 5th grade she wanted to do something to find a cure for diabetes. [C’s three sisters have diabetes, she does not.] She signed up for a “Tour de Cure” bike ride. I showed her how to sign up, how to get sponsors to cover her fundraising requirement, helped her write emails and collect money and then she actually did the 35-mile ride in DC on the given day.

I think what I modeled and what C witnessed was (intense) volunteering outside of the home for the benefit of the girls and with that volunteering she saw how organized I could be. So, that helped her have confidence that I could help her with the administrative part of the Tour de Cure. She also knew I’d help her get out there and ride so she was ready for 35 miles. And what she witnessed inside the home was the daily intensive help with her sisters, how they had to make sure they were where they needed to be with their diabetes. And if they weren’t, I was there to make sure things got on track. That probably fostered two things: a desire to help others, and a desire to relieve everyone of the big D [diabetes] burden. And the only way to really relieve it is to find a cure.

Kelly M:

Proud that I taught them to use their powers/gifts for good! We all have gifts and we all have challenges and if they had all the gifts, then that would be unfair! So use the gifts that God gave you to do the most good and to be of service to others.

Proud that I taught them to be respectful to everyone. Manners and speaking well and respectfully are the easiest things you can do to interact well with others. Respect is a non-negotiable!

Proud that I taught them to have fun, be joyful. Dance, sing, laugh.

Lucille P:

I have twin girls 62 years old. One of the conversations they have frequently with me is the fact—they say—that they credit me for their organizational abilities and having good administrative skills working in an office.

I put them to work at an early age. They were 10 years old when I was working as a clerical worker at a mailing house and I took the work home where I placed labels on envelopes and stuffed them with flyers before bringing them back to be mailed out at the company’s offices. I made them take typing in high school so they could always make a living if they couldn’t find work in their chosen field. They both earned their spending money at university typing term papers for other students.

Today they are both artists—one has her own jewelry business; the other a well-respected sculptor. I am very proud of their ability to organize and make a living in the art world.

Liz B:

One thing I’m proud of is that from a young age I encouraged my children to step outside their comfort zones, even if it was very slight. I nudged them to “fly the coop” for college and experience a different part of the country—even though I definitely cried after dropping my oldest off following a 16-hour drive (she, of course, was completely fine).

The gift back to me has been their independence, their curiosity, and the incredible people and experiences they’ve embraced along the way. I also love that they’ve carried forward the idea of giving experiences as gifts.

And now, as my mom gets older, it means so much to see the strong bond they have with her—and that they prioritize time with her, even from afar. FAMILY FIRST

Mary Anne V:

I’m glad I passed on my passion for my college and my sports teams.

I’m glad we have encouraged each kid to follow their dream even when it wasn’t what we would have chosen for them ourselves.

Carole T:

The thing that comes to mind for me is that I’m proud that I let my kids have as much individual freedom as I did. By that, I mean that my girls had autonomy (and also responsibility) in how and where they spent free time and how they got around. My girls developed relationships in our neighborhood and community independent of our involvement and developed resourcefulness in how they got places. The independence was age-appropriate, of course, and we live in a pedestrian, bike friendly and mass transit-connected community. I’m proud of holding back on the temptation to hover as much as I was inclined to do and love how I saw their confidence and relationship skills grow!

Ashley L:

[Proud that I] truly listened to the kids and had patience and understanding without judgement when they were struggling in life.

Debbie H:

One moment of motherhood I’m especially proud of happened late one night when our daughter, overwhelmed with school and sports, asked us at 11:30 PM to sign off on a safety assignment for school she hadn’t actually completed—learning how to change a tire. It would have been easy to just sign and let it go, but instead, her dad and I took her out to the garage at midnight and had her learn it properly. She was furious in the moment, exhausted and frustrated, but we stood firm. Looking back, I’m proud not because she learned how to change a tire, but because we reinforced something more important: that honesty and integrity matter, even when it’s inconvenient, even when no one is watching, and even when it’s hard.

Kay:

I have two sons (now in their mid-thirties). I am glad that when they expressed their passions to me, I listened and respected their passions even if they were not convenient for me. For example, when my sons were young teenagers, they loved rock music, including heavy metal. Between them they played piano, guitar and drums. They really wanted to go to live concerts. There was no way I would allow them to go to such concerts on their own. For several years, until I felt they were mature enough to go without me, I took them to rock concerts to hear such bands as Killswitch Engage, Slayer, Darkest Hour, Three Inches of Blood, Iron Maiden, etc. I did not care for the music AT ALL, but my sons were very grateful to be able to attend the concerts, and we certainly bonded over them. I also believe I taught them how to be safe at such concerts. Today my sons regularly thank me for how attentive I have been to their interests, including the ones I don’t share.

Ceci G:

It’s hard to say because truly one’s adult children come into their own with the influence of a myriad of people and experiences—not just Mom—but one thing I think is fun is pizza . I learned to make pizza from my mother-in-law, and I’m happy to report that my three kids can all make pizza from scratch. I made sure that they all left home with the right pan for making Grandma Greco’s pizza—

Joanne V:

Our faith in God has sustained us through the years. As I sat through my granddaughter’s baptism and my other granddaughter’s First Communion, I was so happy to see that faith passed down to our girls and now to their children. It’s as important to them as it is to us and I’m proud that they are raising their kids with the same importance of faith in their lives.

Karen G:

One of parenting’s biggest challenges is the balance of encouraging your child to always do their best work, while accepting them for their particular strengths and weaknesses. One of my proud moments as a mother came when my daughter was struggling with a math class in high school. She had stayed after school for extra help, spoke with her teacher, even asked for additional tutoring. It just wasn’t making sense, and as a good student, she was very frustrated with the situation. She and I were talking in the car one day, and I told her that I knew that she was working hard, and all that we asked was that she tried her best. She didn’t need to be perfect. It was not a big deal, but when she came to me years later and told me how much it meant to her to be accepted, I had a moment where I felt that maybe I had been a good mom, at least occasionally!

Wizzie M:

I felt the years were very precious but cannot describe anything specific. We liked to hike and go on bike rides. When kids were very little during Christmas time in the evening I would bundle them up in their jammies, put them in the stroller (and the baby in the baby Bjorn) and take them out for a night walk to see all the houses decorated with lights. I am just proud of doing something fun outside in a different time of day and different season than would be the normal for a walk. I have no idea of the effect other than they enjoyed it and the lights were magical to them. But maybe things like this can encourage creative thinking and belief in possibilities.

Sharon F:

When the kids were middling ages — maybe ranging from ages 6-14 — there was a lot of button-pushing and belittling of each other. Normal kid stuff, but I felt like they already got so much of that in the outside world. I wanted them to be more encouraging of each other at home.

It was Christmas season so our stockings were hung for decor. I cut up slips of construction paper and left them in a bowl with pens nearby. We encouraged all six of us to write notes and leave small treats for each other in the stockings. Then we initiated a weekly affirmation time on Sundays when we would read our notes aloud. While engagement was never perfect, I feel like it helped them to see others’ gifts more positively. And I think it enables them to comfortably be able to say kind things to this day.

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In my enthusiasm for this project I accidentally included two mothers of middle-school aged children. But I’m glad I did because I love their answers.

Beth K:

Having a 12-year-old I feel like all I spend most of my energy saying clean your room and bathroom. However I asked my daughter, and she said you always tell me to enjoy just being a kid and there will always be people who have more than me and always those with less.

The other thing we incorporate in our daily routine is something my dad used to do: it’s saying your “good mornings.” This is when you say good morning and try touching your toes then stand back up straight. You do this at least one time and hopefully more depending how quickly you’re trying to get out the door.

Katie E:

Trained for and ran my first full marathon (now 3). . . sometimes just showing up and toeing the start line feels like a win. I think it shows my daughters that hard things can be done if you work for it even if it doesn’t always look pretty!

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Addendum

When assembling this list, I couldn’t help but think about people who didn’t have a mother growing up or who had an especially difficult or harmful mother—how weird it might be for them to read about wonderful mothers who tried to do their best and loved their children so deeply. So I have a message for those people. It’s schmaltzy, forgive me. I just feel this.

For those who didn’t have the mother they wished for or who had no mother at all. . . know that all these mothers you’ve just met and learned something about. . . if they had the chance to know you. . . would take you into their hearts gladly. . . would treasure the chance to hold just such a one as you in their arms. . . and exclaim over the wonder of you. . . and tell you there is motherly love in the world for you, it will find you. . . and the love in your own heart is inexhaustible and yours to share with the world.

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It’s a commonplace that British actors are on the whole better than American ones. The difference is explained by the more technical and theater-focused training in British drama schools.

But I have an additional explanation, one that is surely not original to me although it’s based on my own observations as a lover of British television shows, and it is this: British actors are allowed to a much greater degree to work with their natural faces and bodies, and that makes them more interesting and rewarding to watch. Whether the character is to-the-manor-born or raised in a workhouse, Brits on screen look like real people. There’s variety and imperfection. Some are more attractive, others less so, but few are picture-perfect. Because in real life, do all rich people look like supermodels? Are all middle-class people just a few make-up chairs away from looking like rich people? Do poor people look poor just because wardrobe staff tangled up their hair and dressed them in burlap? Or do their faces reflect the hardship and trauma they’ve lived through?

It’s not that there are no plain or homely people on American TV, it’s just that by and large if you’re plain or homely in an American series, being plain or homely is your character’s main identity, whereas in British TV, less attractive people can be leads and even considered attractive by other characters in the fictional world of the show, just as they are in real life.

Spend some time with British TV, especially old series, and the sameness of American actors grows boring. I’m not speaking of ethnicity or age necessarily but of natural vs. enhanced faces and bodies. Actors whose prime directive is “Look Desirable” have less range in dramatic roles and less freedom in comedy.

The upcoming American remake of the old British series Doc Martin is a case in point.

For the uninitiated, Doc Martin is about an abrasive London surgeon who develops a career-ending blood phobia and escapes to the beautiful Cornwall town of Portwenn to set up a practice as a GP. Comedy ensues when rude doctor meets eccentric villagers and falls in love with one of them.

No one in the original series is downright ugly, but no one is conventionally attractive, except for love-interest Louisa Glasson and even she would only make it as Best Friend or Co-Worker on American TV. Her smile is lovely but her teeth aren’t veneered; her figure is natural but not head-turning. In Portwenn, people have crooked teeth, big jowls, lumpy bodies, hangdog expressions, wide hips, crazy hair. Doc Martin himself has massive jug ears and strangely flat lips.

The American adaptation, Good Medicine, is set in Maine in a small town also called Port Wenn with the lead character’s same blood phobia and the same types of locals (restaurant owner, contractor, schoolteacher, receptionist, pharmacist, elderly aunt, stray dog). The problem is that everyone looks as bland as the title of the show. The attractive ones are attractive in a generic way, and the “regular” folks all have good skincare, good dental hygiene and presumably good headshots. Nary a big nose in the cast. [Note: I have only watched the trailer for this show and am hopeful that it’s well-done regardless of the casts’ attractiveness.]

I’m not disparaging all American actors and I’m not against pretty people on screen. I like looking at pretty people as much as anyone. I’m just against Pretty People All the Time and the diminishment of our tolerance for the authentic.

Anyone else tired of Nicole Kidman types and their freak faces, stretched and frozen and barely human? Anyone else sick of the endless parade of uniform features, those overly-sculpted cheekbones, the garden-slug lips? I say, give me thin lips! Give me droopy lips! Give me loose skin! Give me bellies, pinched faces, pointy noses, receding chins, big nostrils! Give me humans who look their age, give me youth whose faces are yet unmolded! Let me see actors, not mannequins!

[Outburst complete, stepping down from soapbox, moving towards conclusion.]

With the brand-new competition from AI performers (can’t believe this is a real thing now), actors, be they British or American, will go in one of two directions: either they’ll re-double their efforts to perfect their appearance according to social media standards OR they’ll lean into the character of their beautiful, imperfect and very human faces. Let’s hope it’s the latter.

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Obit Inspo

I came across two obituaries worth sharing, one a profile in patience, the other a profile in tenacity.

Pearl Fryar, “a Picasso of Plants,” according to his New York Times obituary, died in early April at age 86. With discarded plants, hedge clippers, and no formal training, Fryar built a world-renowned topiary garden in South Carolina. The shapes he created with plants and trees are celebrated for their abstract quality, their whimsicality and originality.

Fryar’s life is admirable on many levels, but what stands out is his patience. As stated in his obituary, “Mr. Fryar was an artist at heart rather than a horticulturist. But he had a gardener’s patience. He envisioned forms in his head—he never sketched, saying that it flattened out his perspective and that his drawings were illegible anyway—and was willing to wait a decade for those forms to be realized.” [italics mine]

To make a fish tail out of a cypress tree he had to wait seven years. Seven years waiting for his “canvas” to be ready! I barely have patience waiting for bread to toast.

He was patient in the development of his career as well, his triumph in the garden world taking a slow, circuitous path. Son of a sharecropper, he served in Korea as a chemical weapons specialist, then went to college to study math and chemistry, and got a job as a production engineer with the American Can Company. Not a promising start for the artist he would become.

It was when he bought a house and began to beautify the yard that his interest in gardening took root. He decided he would win Yard of the Month from the local garden club, but he was told he wasn’t eligible because his house was “outside city limits”—a racist stricture that kept black people sidelined. But rather than give up, he worked on creating something so original that the garden club couldn’t help but give him the award. Six years later, working at night on his 3-acre lot, he won.

Over time he opened his grounds to visitors, and soon he was welcoming thousands every year, making sure he greeted each person individually. The Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden is about two hours south of Charlotte, North Carolina and two hours north of Charleston. It looks like a dream—I’d love to see it someday.

Fyrar was the subject of a documentary called A Man Called Pearl. I can’t find it online, but here’s the trailer.

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Ruth Slenczynski, child prodigy pianist and Rachmaninoff’s last student, died in California late April at age 101. Hers is a story of thriving despite childhood abuse.

Her father, a violinist from Poland with no great career of his own, vowed on the battlefield of WWI that if he survived he would create the world’s greatest musician. When his daughter Ruth was born, he inspected her hands and wept with joy at their potential.

He was cruel and abusive in his single-minded pursuit of shaping Ruth into a prodigy. She began piano lessons at age three, and by age four was practicing nine hours a day. At the same young age, she began to play in public (the piano legs had to be sawed down so she could reach the pedals) and performed all over Europe and the United States.

Her training was brutal. She couldn’t eat unless she played her pieces perfectly. She wasn’t allowed toys or friends or outings. Her father hit her if she made a mistake and sometimes hurled her across the room. Her beat her with his fists, the handle of a shovel, and his belt, all over her body, sparing her only her hands. This sentence from her obituary chills me to the bone: He made her repeat aloud: “My life is yours. I must do as you say.”

By age ten she was making the equivalent of $1.8 million a year in today’s dollars. She was burned out at fifteen. On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, she developed acute appendicitis, and her father made her perform at Town Hall in New York anyway. She got scathing reviews—understandably, the poor girl had appendicitis!—and her father disowned her. She had no money because he kept all her earnings for himself. She had to sell her blood for income.

She married, went to school, taught piano, published her memoir as a cautionary tale against child abuse, and eventually re-emerged as a concert artist and a celebrated recording artist known for her interpretation of Chopin. She played with the Boston Pops, performed for four presidents (including a four-handed duet with Truman) and was revered as a piano teacher at Southern Illinois University. She had a cult following in Japan and even put out a new album at age 97.

What’s most amazing about her is that she was a happy person. Her monster father didn’t destroy her life. (I do wonder about her mother—have to guess she was miserable and afraid.) When her father was dying, Ruth tried to offer forgiveness, but he told her mother that he was the one who needed to forgive and he would not.

In recent photographs and videos, she’s always smiling. “Looking back doesn’t do any good,” she once said in an interview. “Look forward, and make that as beautiful as you can.”

The human spirit is an amazing force.

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It started with the appearance and sudden proliferation of an innocent-looking tree in my yard. Someone told me it was called a chokeberry—apt because it has berries and strangles all the plants around it—but not accurate, because a chokeberry is not a tree but a bush and grows in the eastern United States and not in Hawaii.

This tree, whatever it’s called, is spread by birds crapping out its berries. Its leaves are waxy and attractive enough that you might think it’s worth keeping. Let it grow at your peril. Ignore a twig one season and the next it’s a full-fledged tree with a dozen babies hiding themselves in other garden plants. I find offshoots everywhere, in the byzantine roots of a bamboo clump, in the crook of a Song of India trunk, in between the branches of a gardenia bush, and worst, in a patch of razor-edged bromeliads where it darn well knows I can’t reach it.

Last year, in a frenzy of hatred, I was pruning a bendy branch of this tree about two inches in girth, and it snapped back and hit me with such force that I fell to my knees. I thought I was going to throw up from the pain. Not coincidentally, I developed a pinched nerve between my shoulder blades that took a year to resolve and cemented the weed tree’s status as my most despised enemy.

Meanwhile the tree also invaded a nearby mahogany forest that was part of my daily walk. Before the weed tree took root there, the forest was a wonder of symmetry, with thousands of trees planted in rows as even as a military band. But after?—pshhht!—you could only see the original grid if you looked up to the tops of the mahoganies.

So I began to vandalize. Every day on my walk I’d snap new growth of the weed tree in half, ten or more at least. It was a Sisyphean task—I’d never beat it back—but my hatred of the symmetry-destroying tree compelled me to break the branches with my bare hands like a cartoon giant on a rampage. In a parting gesture on my last day on island I broke at least thirty. [If you are a fan of Enneagram, at this point you will have correctly guessed my number.]

Earlier this year, back again on my forest walk, I saw that the weed trees had grown fatter and taller and fuller and denser. My daily vandalism had come to nothing. But it wasn’t until my second walk that I realized I could pass by the trees and not feel anything. My compulsion to break them was gone. My resentment of the forest transformation had disappeared. My rage, evaporated.

Where did it go? Over the months I was off island, I had done no work to eradicate my hatred. I didn’t meditate on it, I hadn’t prayed over it, I hadn’t experienced any breakthrough insights. I did nothing except not feed or nuture it, and it just. . . went away.

If I had lost a toenail, a tooth, or clump of hair, I’d know how it I lost it. But losing an emotion? A much more complicated and possibly impossible case to unravel. If there’s an inverse to an unsolved murder—an untraceable gift, let’s say—that’s what happened to me.

This is not a screed against strong feelings. Strong emotions are how art and social movements begin, how our species recreates, how people find the courage to make sacrifices for other people. And this is not to say I’ve gotten over my dislike of the weed tree. I still fight it tooth and nail in my own yard. But the weed trees on the forest walk do not belong to me, and my antipathy to them has turned to apathy.

To be released from hatred of a tree is but a little thing, I admit, no great triumph of the human spirit. Plain old silly when you think about other emotions people experience, like grief. But still. I claim that invisible mending of my nervous system as a beautiful and comforting mystery. Could it be we just aren’t meant to hold onto hateful emotions? Could it be our temperaments inch back towards equilibrium, unbidden by us?

The disappearance of my tree rage reminds me of a poem-prayer I’ve loved for a long time. It was written by Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Chardin studied evolution and developed a theory called the Omega Point, which posits that all things are moving towards a single point of unification. I’m not going to attempt to explain or discuss it in this space, except to say that his theory relies upon, as does evolution itself, slow, unseen work happening outside of our consciousness.

(You don’t have to believe in his theory or believe in anything spiritual to find his poem consoling. “Time” works as a substitute for “God” in this poem, as does “the universe” or even “something not ourselves.”)

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

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I Swear I’m Over It But Still. . .

Does anyone know the name of this tree?

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Proud Auntie News

My nephews’ band Hathway just dropped a new single: “How Did It Happen To You.” I’ve got it on repeat. Give it a listen! You can also follow them on Instagram.

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More Music For Ya

Last fall in Sicily, my husband and I noticed that in every place we stayed, the host played beautiful music in the morning which set a relaxing tone for the day. Why don’t we do that? we wondered. Such a simple thing to do. So I’ve made a morning playlist of my own. Every time I remember to play it, my morning takes a gentle turn. (Unfortunately, Husband has begun to find my chill irritating and heads to another room when it’s on.)

The playlist isn’t finished yet, but I thought I’d share it now. “Morning Chillax” is on Spotify, but I’ll list the songs for you to find on other platforms if needed.

• “October” by Okonski

• “Selenge by Celine Dessberg

• “Grammofon” (Belarusian Radio and Television Orchestra, Vasiliy Leonov)

• The Magie Flute, “Papagena” (Mozart) Wilfried Gahmilich, Anna Gonda, etc

• “Bradenburg Concerto No. 4 in G” (Bach) English Chamber Orchestra

• “Ylang Ylang” by FKJ

• “Chintamani” by Celine Dessberg

• “Luther (String Orchestra)” Steve Hackman adaptation of Kendrick Lamar song

• “va sans crainte” by Celine Dessberg

• “Love Is Here to Stay” by Oscar Peterson

• “Seagull Dance” by very noise person, J. Kobee and Somebuddy

• “Liloa’s Mele” by Sonny Chillingworth

• “Ku’u Kika Kahiko” by Ozzie Kotani

• “Carolan’s Concerto” by the Chieftains

• “El Sueno” by LA LOM

• “Dove” by Bill Laurance

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My dear friend Helaine turned 100 last week. She lives in her own home, manages her own bills, monitors her own health, and enjoys visits and phone calls from a wide circle of friends. She has her fair share of age-related problems, but she’s happy, busy, and as independent as circumstances allow.

The first thing you need to know about Helaine is that she has a genius for friendship. At a time in life when most people tighten their social circles or even withdraw altogether, Helaine is keeping up with old friends and making new ones. Every time I visit we’re interrupted by phone calls from some friend or other— a woman from her old bridge group or book group or bible study, a neighbor, children of friends or relatives who’ve passed away. I remember once being surprised at how well she knew her postal worker who had stopped in to check on her and have a quick chat.

She has an innate frugality that exists side-by-side with her enjoyment of life’s pleasures. She doesn’t use the dryer—never has—to save wear and tear on her clothes and bed linens. She’s careful with her money and wary of being taken advantage of. But what she loves, she loves without restraint. Food is one of her delights. She has an enchanting way of describing a meal she’s prepared or had at a restaurant: “It was delicious,” she says in her low voice, shaking her head as if in wonder. With people she loves she’s even more effusive. More than once during a visit, with tears in her eyes, she’ll tell you how much she loves you and what you mean to her. And also tell you how much she loves other people in her life who come up in conversation. “Barbara!” she says of a friend, “She’s my angel!”

And then there’s her toughness and resourcefulness. Woe betide the contractor not giving her a fair shake or the doctor not giving her a full listen or proper respect. She’s an unrelenting and wily negotiator—and a fighter determined to achieve her goals. Here’s a little story to illustrate the latter: when Helaine was newly married, she and her husband Frank, who was just out of the service, moved to Washington, D.C. so he could go to school there. They had $65 to their name. The first apartment they looked at was full of cockroaches. Helaine refused to even unpack her trunk and took it upon herself to find a better place to live. In no time at all she landed a job as an au pair that included room and board in a beautiful home in a lovely neighborhood.

[The family she worked for was the MacKinnons. George MacKinnon was a congressman and a famous judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals. Helaine’s charge was little Kitty MacKinnon, who you might know—if you are up on your feminist history—as legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon. Among her many accomplishments, MacKinnon created the legal foundation for the idea that sexual harassment in education and the workplace is sex discrimination.]

Over the years I’ve tried to document Helaine’s wisdom and bon mots, on tape and on video, and I’ll share some of those today.

How to make friends: First of all, she says, you have to take an interest in other people’s lives: “The furnace man who comes in, he’s a friend of mine. I asked him, ‘Are you happy in your job?’ I always ask that. And before you know it, we’re friends.” She added, “Even now, I have people coming here and they tell me all their problems. That’s okay. I’m a good listener. You have to be in life. It’s not all about yourself.”

How to maintain friendships: “I keep in contact, but I don’t overdo it.” She’ll call or send handwritten notes. (Her handwriting is exquisite. I don’t know anyone of any age who has such an elegant script. Depending on her health, she may have to switch to print, but even that is even, legible and lovely.)

What she likes in a friend: “Honesty. And don’t flower an experience and make it what it isn’t. Directness. I want people straight out.”

How to accept hard things that happen: “Mind over matter. Don’t think about it. Just go on your way. You’re in control of your own mind.”

The secret to happiness: “Keep busy. Just do it.”

Life advice: “Be yourself. Don’t put on airs, as they say. Be interested in other people. Be frugal with money. Don’t drink alcohol to an extent. But you can have a snort—as the English say—now and then.”

I’ll also share a few videos I’ve taken of Helaine over the years.

Here she is describing when she first saw Gone With the Wind in the movie theater:

This one will give you an idea of her sense of humor:

And finally, I’ll leave you with a message from Helaine (originally intended for one of my daughters, but edited to reach everyone, because after all, Helaine has never met a stranger). You may want to save this one to look at whenever you need a boost or kindly word.

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Let’s shower her with good wishes!

Now that you know a little about her, maybe you’d like to wish Helaine a happy 100^th birthday too! Please leave a message in the comments. She’ll be so surprised and delighted!

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Years ago my friend Danny made a list of seven life lessons that he shared with his teenaged sons before they went off to college, one lesson a day for seven days. He deserves a parenting prize for that, and methinks his own Restless Egg issue as well; but for today, I’m going to look at just one of his lessons and turn it to my purposes. Some time after talk of tumbleweeds and before library books (okay, definitely going to have to devote an issue to this), Danny told his boys, “You are your friends.” In other words, the people you hang out with will influence and change you, so choose friends carefully.

I’ve been thinking about this adage because I’ve been hanging out with an unpleasant crew, and the association is making me unpleasant too—peevish and slightly glum. My new friends are selfish, vengeful, foolish, violent, judgmental, weak, cruel and prone to damning each other to hell. They live in old, dank houses that match their moods, houses with names like Thrushcroft Grange and Wuthering Heights. Yes, I’m speaking of Heathcliff, Catherine, Nelly, Joseph, Hindley, young Linton, Hareton, and Cathy— a twisted crew sprung from Emily Bronte’s brilliant and deeply weird mind. Oh, I did enjoy my time with them! I loved it, they were wildly entertaining. I’ll remember the hours I spent listening to Michael Kitchen’s narration of Wuthering Heights as a peak “reading” experience.

But it did darken my days.

I felt the same after reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and after watching shows like Succession, Girls, White Lotus and a single episode of Yellowstone. As fun as it can be to watch bad people behave badly—much more interesting than watching good people behave virtuously—after a time I need to pull myself away and decompress, re-orient myself to the real world, remind myself that what I’m consuming is only one particular writer’s sour vision, not the final word on human existence.

Back in pre-Spotify days, a friend liked to gift me homemade CD’s she’d burned. During one period when she was feeling blue, she gave me CD after CD of mournful singer/songwriter tracks that gave her solace and me a headache. This went on for a few weeks. Then one day she seemed lighter. She told me that her daughter had gotten frustrated with her low spirits and had thrown up her hands and said, “Mom, just stop listening to sad music!” We both laughed, it seemed so obvious. The music that matched her mood was—to some extent—creating her mood.

This idea that something external, be it bad friends or sad music, can shape the internal finds perfect expression in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen.” As a child that story disturbed me, and I still don’t like it—it’s part sugary excess, part existential terror, and part heavy-handed sermonizing. With frightening illustrations.

The story begins with a hobgoblin who makes a looking glass that distorts reality and makes it ugly:

. . . he had made a mirror with the power of causing all that was good and beautiful when it was reflected therein, to look poor and mean; but that which was good-for-nothing and looked ugly was shown magnified and increased in ugliness. In this mirror the most beautiful landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the best persons were turned into frights, or appeared to stand on their heads; their faces were so distorted that they were not to be recognized; and if anyone had a mole, you might be sure that it would be magnified and spread over both nose and mouth.

Meanwhile angelic playmates Kay and Gerda frolic innocently in summer landscapes, holding hands and singing hymns. They are so annoyingly sweet they actually kiss roses.

Trouble begins when the goblin’s mirror breaks into a million pieces and falls from the sky. When a shard lands in Kay’s eye, he becomes aggressive and cruel. He sees worms in the roses, kicks over flower boxes, and says mean things to Gerda when she cries. Then he is abducted by the Snow Queen who kisses him till an icy lump forms in his heart. She takes him to her kingdom in the wintry north where he is cold and unhappy and entirely forgetful of his former life.

Gerda is heartbroken and endures many trials to find Kay. Finally she reaches the Snow Queen’s icy palace and sees her old playmate nearly black with cold. He makes no sign of recognition. When she cries, her tears melt the ice in Kay’s heart, and when she sings their old favorite hymn, Kay cries so hard the splinter falls out of his eye—and we’re back to kissing roses.

What scared me about this fairy tale when I was little was the complete erasure of identity. Sweet Kay becomes malicious Kay, and were it not for Gerda’s super-human heroics, Kay would sit in the frozen palace till he died. Does that sound like the effects of binge-watching reality TV? Cynical movies? Mocking, heartless banter on social media?

Being amused by awful people a little here and a little there is all good fun, but too much of it and all the time—Danny’s dictum applies. Our vision is distorted and we distort ourselves. Gerda may come but we won’t even want to see her, so addicted we become to ugliness.

I’m not advocating for shielding oneself from bad news or ignoring the suffering of other people. That’s a pinched and less-than-human existence. I’m just saying that for all the Heathcliffs and Snow Queens and hobgoblins in the world—and they are there—there is goodness too. And goodness needs to be noticed so it can be emulated.

Ah look at me, sermonizing like old Anderson himself!

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Hang Around With a Really Good Guy Instead

Michael Kitchen, the narrator of the Wuthering Heights book I listened to, has been a favorite of mine since I watched him in the long-running series Foyle’s War. If you’re looking for a show to binge, and you like period drama and a little bit of murder, this is for you. The quietly upstanding Detective Christopher Foyle and his plucky driver Samantha Stewart track down traitors, black market thieves and murderers in a coastal town on the English Channel during WWII. Crime writer Antony Horowitz created the show and based many of the plots on historical events.

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Singing Alone, Together

My idea of heaven is to sing in harmony with other voices. I mean this literally. Unfortunately I’m not one of those singers who can spontaneously find thirds and fifths. If I try to improvise, my voice hits like Florence Foster Jenkins’. I’m just not good at it, even when I practice.

The other factor keeping me from my harmonizing my heart out is that I’m not often in the company of people who will sing with me.

So I was excited to find on Instagram (and I’m sure there’s more on youtube) dozens if not hundreds of accounts tagged “Sing With Me.” The poster sings harmony and invites viewers to sing melody. No talent for harmonizing required, and you get to experience the joy of putting your voice in the company of another. It does seem a little sad to be singing with a stranger online, but it’s better than not singing at all.

Here’s a few of my favorites:

@theofficialdavide “Hey Jude”

@theeddiewang “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You”

@scotty_tune “Edelweiss”

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With no new series to binge on, Husband becomes strangely amenable to watching Jane Austen movies and television series. It’s possible he’s discovered a newfound interest in Regency social systems and landed gentry but more likely his hip is locked and he’s unable to get up from the couch. Mine is not to reason why but to do and press play.

We begin with the 1995 BBC six-part series Pride and Prejudice. Husband has never seen Kiera Knightly’s predictably indignant performance in the 2005 film, so he can’t appreciate how far superior Jennifer Ehle’s merry-eyed Lizzie Bennet is. He also doesn’t find David Bambur’s simpering, aristocracy-obsessed Mr. Collins as hilarious as I do. But no matter. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a husband watching Jane Austen with his wife is a very good husband indeed.

By episode 4 Husband says he is unimpressed by Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy. I’m surprised that I agree. After many years of considering Firth an excellent Darcy, mostly because he looks handsome in a wet white blouse, I’m shocked at how limited his range is. Firth’s expression changes so little from a scowl and furrowed brow that it’s as if he’s had reverse Botox.

For three nights running we watch the marital prospects of the Bennet sisters come and go and come again. I assume Husband is enjoying it as much as I am because he has not fled the room. Unfortunately, he’s lukewarm. “Stupid English,” he says, “all they do is go on walks and talk and drink tea.” Precisely. Isn’t it wonderful!

We follow up with the 1995 Persuasion starring the perfectly-cast Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds as Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth. This is a risky choice for us because the pace of the movie is slow and the leads are quieter and not as conventionally attractive as in P & P. I’m hoping Husband sees that the chemistry between Anne and Wentworth is off the charts, and that Anne, without benefit of new make-up or new clothes, experiences a glow-up for the ages, a change occurring solely because of love. Persuasion is my favorite Austen novel, and this is one of my favorite Austen adaptations.

Husband doesn’t love it at all. He says, “What is the point?” He means not just the point of Persuasion but of all the Austen he’s been watching.

The point, I say, is that women’s financial stability was completely dependent on making a good marriage or on not having a brother or cousin or other male relation who would kick her out of her recently-deceased father’s home. And also—the point is—romance and— human nature—and crazy characters and sharp dialogue and—for Pete’s sake, I’m not writing a term paper. It’s funny and it’s pretty to look at, isn’t that enough?

By the time we begin Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility he’s reached his Austen saturation point. He leaves after twenty minutes, before I can complain to him about the miscasting of Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant who have the romantic chemistry of two people standing in checkout lines in two separate grocery stores, and about the way Grant’s clothes hang on him like a boy wearing his big brother’s football uniform, and how Alan Rickman seems to think he’s in a zombie movie, and how Kate Winslet manages to make the irritating Marianne infinitely more irritating. Alas, my barbed commentary finds an audience only here, with you.

All being fair in love and binging-watching, we switch to Star Trek, specifically Star Trek: Enterprise. For those not familiar with the Star Trek oeuvre, Enterprise is the prequel to the original Star Trek, with Captain Archer sitting at the helm instead of Captain Kirk. Archer shares with Kirk a hot-headed approach to crises, so it’s familiar territory.

In series 3, Archer has to convince a council of Xindi to help him stop an Earth-destroying weapon. The Xindis are an alien race that include multiple species such as the Reptilians (jacked-up lizard-people), the Aquatics (huge turtles who live in an aquarium and communicate like whales) and Insectoids (7-foot-tall ants who emit crackles and when necessary pinch the captain into submission). The real enemy are the time-travelling, shape-shifting Sulibans, who are green and seem to be covered in composite driveway material.

When the Suliban weapon is about to blow up Earth, Dolim, the head Reptilian, shouts, “Destiny!” Seconds later a bomb destroys the Suliban weapon, earth is saved, and Dolim screams, “NOOOOOO!”

I fail to see the superior content.

First of all, I want to say, wouldn’t T’Pol, Archer’s second-in-command and the requisite Vulcan crewmember, look better in an empire gown trimmed in lace with some curls spilling from her bun to cover her pointy ears? No, Husband prefers her plain old (very) form-fitting unitard.

But seriously, isn’t it more interesting to watch a noisy family at table, clattering forks on china plates, and servants ladling soup, and goblets of wine capturing the candlelight than to watch dinner dispensed from an espresso-like machine that no one is ever shown eating? Wouldn’t you rather see English countryside, open fields and open skies, than low-tech special-effects meteors or nebulas? Life-changing, wax-sealed letters opened in private over transporter machines on the fritz at the worst possible moment? Dialogue like, “Pray do not talk of that odious man!” instead of “Shields at forty percent!”?

But I enjoy Star Trek well enough, I don’t ask what’s the point, because I know what the point is. A headstrong but principled man makes a risky decision that never, ever goes belly-up and always leads to the salvation of a crew, a species or a planet. I prefer fantasies of the Austen variety: a woman of high spirits or good sense or both navigates a world of eccentrics, schemers and hypocrites to find love and economic security.

But to each his own. Live long and prosper. Or just go on walks and talk and drink tea.

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Not For Women Only

I was surprised to learn that Husband had never read a Jane Austen novel, given that he went to an excellent high school and college, and in his youth read Henry James for pleasure. I wondered if Not Reading Austen was a male thing, so I made an unscientific and unbalanced survey of 21 men of my acquaintance: Have you ever read a Jane Austen novel for school or for enjoyment?

I was expecting that almost none of them had, but seven answered in the affirmative, and of those, only two mentioned not liking it (“a forced read,” one said, and “too proper,” said the other). An eighth responder said he had tried to read Pride and Prejudice but that it couldn’t compete with the old Flashman series. One friend said he’d never read Austen but his Austen-loving daughter gave him the “Cliff notes” and that he’d watched some Austen movies with her. One funny fellow said, no Austen but I crushed a piano today for work. And sent a picture. Finally, one of the better-read respondents in the group said he preferred Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, which is funny because who is Tom Jones but a more charming and much more good-hearted Wickham, a womanizer out to find his fortune but falling prey to drinking, gambling, and debt?

In the end I couldn’t draw any conclusions from my little survey. If I had polled a group of women the results would probably have been similar except that more women would mention watching Austen movies.

Actually I did discover one thing: the 21 men of my acquaintance were quick to respond and seemed to enjoy being asked about themselves.

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Not for Austen Purists

If you want more contemporary Austen-adjacent shows, here are a few recommendations:

• Miss Austen with the wonderful Keely Hawes as Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra. I resisted watching this series for the very reasons I stated in the last issue of Restless Egg—it’s hard for me to watch shows where a character dies of cancer. I started and stopped it a few times, but at some point, with nothing else to amuse me, I saw it through, and now I recommend it to everyone.

  There’s a scene at the end (and this is no spoiler because as we all know Jane Austen died at age 41 of breast cancer) in which Cassandra lies abed with Jane as they say their final goodbyes. It’s tender and beautiful and delicate and unforgettable. I sobbed my way through it, both because I felt the love between the sisters and because it brought back two memories of saying final goodbyes to people I loved. The first memory was when my mother was in the hospital near the very end of her life. I had to say goodbye, and although I had plans to return in a week or two, I knew it was probably the last time I’d see her. I got in her bed, something I hadn’t done since I was little, held in her my arms, and told her all the things such a moment elicits. My mother, being both practical and strong, probably understood what I was thinking.

  

  The other memory, a similar one, is of the last time I kissed my sister Josie goodbye (at least while she was lucid and awake). She was also in the hospital, and once again I was headed back to Michigan with scheduled plans to return. We had just been belly-laughing and then it was time to go. See you in two weeks, I said, trying to keep things light. But once again I knew it was possible and maybe even probable that I wouldn’t see her again. We looked at each other and held hands and I kissed her forehead again and again. I worried I was sending the wrong message—that I couldn’t bear to leave her because I wouldn’t see her again—and Josie had no intention of going anywhere—but I couldn’t hold back. My dear sweet sister accepted it with an open spirit, but who knows with what firm intentions in her heart.

  Sorry for that digression, it was just there when I thought of Miss Austen, ready to spill out.

• Death Comes to Pemberly with Anna Maxwell Martin (a favorite!) as Lizzie and Matthew Rhys as Darcy. The series is based on P.D. James’ book of the same name, and begins with Lizzie married and settled with her son at Darcy’s magnificent Pemberly estate. When there’s a murder in the Pemberly woods, and the dastardly Wickham is the main suspect, Lizzie plays sleuth. So much to like here: a murder mystery, a great cast, and humor and suspense in equal measure. (Quick plug for Anna Maxwell Martin: catch her in the wonderful Bletchley Circle; in Bleak House as the most perfect Esther Summerhouse playing opposite Gillian Anderson’s Lady Deadlock; and more recently in the charming murder-mystery Ludwig.)

• Looking forward to The Other Bennet Sister, a new series about Mary, Lizzie’s less-charming and to my mind, much-abused sister. Mrs. Bennet is played by another favorite actress of mine, Ruth Jones of Gavin and Stacey fame, where she played the unforgettable Nessa. Curious to see how Jones plays the role, especially since the Mrs. Bennet in the 1995 BBC series was played by another Gavin and Stacy veteran, Alison Steadman. Steadman’s very funny Mrs. Bennet keeps her voice at a hysterical pitch, which borders on the unbearable but never crosses over. Jones is going to be entirely different.

• Oscar-nominated short Jane Austen’s Period Drama. Take 13 minutes and watch this delight. The names of the characters are a little too on the nose, but get past that, and you’ll be laughing out loud. What is it about? “The bloody bits.” Many thanks to my friend Ed, father of two daughters and one daughter-in-law, for recommending this to me.

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An Austen Rabbit Hole

If you’re curious about why Mrs. Bennet was so desperate to find husbands for her five daughters, that is, if you want to know more about English inheritance laws at the time of Austen, here’s a good explanation.

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This post is going to be rambling, so lace up your walking shoes and follow along—we’re going for a stroll.

Hours after the biggest winds from the Kona Low subsided (which knocked over a truck-sized clump of bamboo in our yard) I woke at dawn with stomach cramps the likes of which I haven’t felt since childbirth. Husband found me curled up on the cold bathroom tile in a state of—I would say dishabille, but that sounds alluring, and the sweaty gorgon he saw laid out before him decidedly was not.

No one likes being sick with the D (as my sister would say), or worse, the V (I came to the brink but was mercifully pulled back), but being a little sick, as I was after the waves had passed and I felt merely weak and tired, can be quite pleasant as long as there is someone to drape a blanket over you and ask if you need more water or a piece of dry toast.

I felt all the better when I realized I didn’t have the flu at all and I would not be experiencing any more D or possible V, or passing the D and possible V on to the person who was bringing me water and dry toast. What I had was food poisoning from an old bottle of kombucha. This is what you call karma. I hoard kombucha in the fridge, up to fourteen bottles at a time, because I hate not having a steady supply, and my preferred brands can be tricky to find on island. Judging by the faded and unreadable expiration date, the offending bottle may have been around for months, continuously pushed to the back of the fridge to make room for more bottles.

My pleasure in being a little sick goes back to childhood, when fevers and stomach flus augured a visit from Dr. Roundbelly. Dr. Roundbelly, who looked like my dad but was much jollier, arrived with a small gift—a coloring book, new crayons, paper dolls, and when we were older, magazines. Such gifts and attention were the best medicine, especially in a family of 11 children, where gifts and attention can be scarce commodities. And so to this day I have no shame in being fussed over while I recover, as long as the fussing is modest, short-lived, and takes place in private.

I’ve been sick for longer periods than hours or days, and with an illness that carried no guarantee of recovery. I’d never say I enjoyed that time, but the respite from daily duties and the suspension of ordinary life had its charms—not to be explicated or explored here in this space, on this stroll. Let’s move on.

Younger, before facing serious illness myself or that of anyone close to me, I loved a good sickbed-to-deathbed scene in a novel. How many times and with what delight I cried over Helen Burns’ death in Jane Eyre and Beth March’s in Little Women! But such fictional scenes no longer carry the comfort of catharsis. Losing people you love to illness or seeing up close the suffering illness brings will ruin that for you.

Nowadays the only illnesses I care to read about are of the Jane Austen variety, in which recovery is a given (for the reader, anyway) and illness is a prelude to romance. In Austen’s world, the ill person may suddenly realize who her truest love actually is (Marianne in Sense and Sensibility) or the caregiver will win the admiration of her future spouse because of her competent and tender sickbed ministrations (Lizzie caring for Jane in Pride and Prejudice, Fanny caring for her ne’er-do-well cousin Tom in Mansfield Park, and Anne’s level-head dealing with the injured Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion).

Besides Austen’s romantic sickbed scenes, there are two other illness narratives I take pleasure in, the first for its implications and the second for its humor.

When I saw it at the movie theater nine years ago, I can’t say I delighted in Phantom Thread, but it’s stayed with me all these years and I think about it more often than I’d ever expected to. The pace is slow and ponderous—your nervous system will be lulled into a near comatose state—at least until the V begins. Ralph Fiennes plays a domineering, hyper-controlling couturier in 1950’s London who is [SPOILER] brought to near death by poisoned mushrooms. His wife and muse serves him the mushrooms on purpose. It’s her way of bringing him back to her when she feels him slipping away emotionally and of renewing his creativity when she sees him drifting artistically. At the end of the movie, when he realizes what’s been happening, he willingly subjects himself to her treatment.

What is a phantom thread but an unseen binder of souls, a connecting force that begins in vulnerability and humility, which happen to be two side effects of illness? Artistry has its own phantom thread, a spirit of continuously renewed creativity pulled along by gratitude—one of the many possible byproducts of recovery. In the unavoidable cycle of illness and recovery, connection and creativity are a choice. Bitterness is the other choice, and it is not a good one.

Betty MacDonald’s The Plague and I is pure comedy with some quiet moments of poignancy. The book is a hilarious account of MacDonald’s nine-month stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the late 1930’s. At the time she was hospitalized, MacDonald was the mother of two young children, near broke, and so full of life and jokes that it seems impossible she could lie still for all that time. (MacDonald would go on to write the famous Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children’s books, and humorous books for adults, including The Egg and I and, my favorite, Anybody Can Do Anything.)

These days tuberculosis is treated with antibiotics, but during MacDonald’s sanatorium stay, complete rest and isolation were the prescribed treatment. Here are the rules of Pinewood, as dispensed by a nurse she calls “Granite Eyes” during MacDonald’s first weekly bath:

“Patients must not read. Patients must not write. Patients must not talk. Patients must not laugh. Patients must not sing. Patients must lie still. Patients must not reach. Patients must relax. Patients must . . .” I was ready for the bath so I interrupted to ask if I might put a little cold water into the steaming tub or if there was a rule that patients must be boiled.

It’s hard to imagine anyone enduring such an empty day for months on end (years for most of the patients) all the while being harassed to keep a positive attitude so they can be cured. Which MacDonald manages to do. (Caveat: I am not someone who believes a positive attitude is a key factor in getting well. Plenty of doomsayers, complainers and whiners recover just fine while too many cheerful, hopeful folks are taken early.)

While I was looking into pre-antibiotic tuberculosis treatment, I came across a diary written by another young mother facing the disease. The diary was written in 1944 by a 32-year-old British woman who was placed in a sanatorium and separated from her husband Bill and 15-month old baby. She’s not a humorous writer by any means, but she captures the spirit of the times and of Betty MacDonald in a way I find touching. She wrote a list of TB survival guidelines (which I’ve edited and shortened). They’re good for whatever ails you or even if nothing ails you at all:

1. Never give way to self pity. List the disadvantages and then, having conquered them, forget them—

2. Always appear cheerful. Partly for self-discipline and partly because people will soon get sick of me if I don’t

3. Interest myself as much as possible in outside things—both world-wide, through the newspapers, books and also personal (our friends’ affairs, troubles and joys, and those of anyone else I hear of). In other words, cultivate an extrospective and not an introspective outlook

4. Try and improve my mind by reading and thinking, and use this period as one of rest, refreshment and study, in preparation for trying to make some constructive contribution to the good of the world

5. Do not talk about myself and my illness

6. Do not organize other people (very easy habit to fall into when you are lying in bed doing nothing, and most irritating for people who are up and busy and think ‘yes, it’s all very well for her...’)

7. ‘Blessed is he that expecteth nothing’, i.e. don’t expect Bill and other people to be always coming to see me; cultivate the habit of being pleased when they come and not aggrieved when they don’t, so that it never becomes a duty to them.

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Unsolicited Advice for Parents:

Re: Dr. Roundbelly. I highly recommend the creation of alter egos for the entertainment of children. Dr. Roundbelly brought so much delight to our lives and is one of our best memories of our dad. My mother also had an alter ego, an identical twin sister who lived in Denver. For the amusement of the older six kids, my mother would step into a closet and say, “When the door is opened, it will be my identical twin sister who comes out.” And they believed her. For the younger five of us, the never-seen identical twin’s absence was explained by a disease called pea-itis. My mother’s imaginary twin never ate her peas, so she blew up into a giant green ball, rolled down the street, and was never heard from again. We loved this story and begged her to tell it again and again and again.

I carried on the tradition for my own kids. My alter ego was—well, I hesitate to give you her name because with the distance of time it sounds cringy—but I’ll say it anyway because the fact is, the creation of an alter ego requires the abandonment of dignity and seriousness. Mrs. Figglefump wore a silly hat, spoke with an English accent and gossiped with the children over tea about imagined bizarre events.

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Grocery store packed. Buy enough kombucha and Peppermint Patties for week of hunkering down. Collect and safeguard possible projectiles in yard. Do not want 60 m.p.h. winds propelling coconuts through window while I sit checking weather app. Husband moves glass lanterns on lanai to safety.

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Outside, partly sunny. Weather app still insistent DANGER is imminent. Barely-moving air seems portent of bad things to come.

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Eat nuts, guzzle lactose-free yogurt drink, swallow calcium pill size of big toe. Proud of self for acting on worrisome bone-density-scan results from December. Do not want to be old woman with bones like garden hoses, too weak to do important storm prep in yard.

Eat more nuts, also pumpkin seeds. Forage for protein sources like indoor squirrel. Need to acquire 54 grams per day. Become confused about calcium sources vs. protein sources. Plan to add moringa to diet, as moringa leaf has both. Then no confusion. Hope that newly-planted moringa tree cutting withstands 60 m.p.h. wind.

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Morning clear, no drama outside. Feel disappointed. Husband replaces glass lanterns on lanai side tables. Meteorologist says, “I will admit to you that the first round of storms has been poorly modeled.” Feel momentarily affectionate towards humble meteorologist. Unfortunately meteorologist not humble at all, continues on, “Do not be complacent about sunny skies, second wave is still coming.”

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Do not believe your lying eyes!

Realize that enjoyment of excellent weather prevented by grim meteorologist and by anticipation of sudden gust of Kona wind flinging yard debris through window.

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Attend new workout class to further encourage disintegrating bones to un-disintegrate. Workout called The Practice. Uses hybrid Pilates reformer to torture body in medieval fashion. Call it The Rack-tice. Balance on Rack, concerned that weak ankle bones unable to withstand sliding platforms. Strong possibility of falling into well between platforms despite required purchase and use of grip socks.

Novelty grip socks have “mental” written on left toe and “vacay” on the other, but placed on wrong feet. Eyes go continuously to right foot, read “mental,” over and over. Do not dispute accuracy. After class tell instructor it was slightly easier than first time. Immediately see, from tightening of tight body, that instructor is offended. “Don’t say ‘easier,’” she reprimands. “Say ‘more manageable.’” Question self if this means bones and muscles never get stronger or that The Practice always gets worse.

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Weather warnings make national news. Daughter on mainland texts, “Be safe in the big storms!” Text her we are in no danger. Do not text her possibility of lethal contact with coconuts and flying palm branches.

Turn to Nextdoor for more accurate weather news. Find posts on Looking for an artist to paint my rooster, Anyone missing a duck, Need pig hunter to catch pig ruining garden, Want to borrow a dehydrator, Looking to re-home baby pig that drinks warm milk every two hours and gets up throughout the night, Wish I could take baby pig but getting ready to retire. Only one post about storm, followed by five comments saying, Believe it when I see it.

Multiple posts on desperately seeking housing.

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Text plumber to come for third time to fix mysterious gurgling and tapping in kitchen pipes. Plumber texts back that continued gurgling and tapping is “strange.” Plumber also Venmos request for payment of last service call during which plumber crawled under house, discovered “major problem,” and claimed to have fixed it. Plumber is young and confident and uses picture with shirt off for Venmo profile. Irritated by shirtless plumber and concerned about continued gurgle.

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In need of definitive report on storm, read Glen’s Daily Weather Narrative. In past Glen begins narrative with view from mountain retreat in sunny Maui. Today Glen powers up his cell phone in case of outages and uses exclamation point to report flash of lightening. Do not feel snarky about over-excited punctuation because thunderstorms not common in winter in Hawaii.

Do feel superior to Glen because for once better weather on north shore Kauai than on Maui. Go for walk. See yellow chicken all alone running in silly fashion across dirt road. Skies clouding up. Pass by dead bird on grass, not maimed, not sickly. Wonder why dead. Maybe just gave up. Slight drizzle begins. Hear distant thunder. Instinctively start running as if air raid siren blaring. Realize run is exactly like chicken’s, quick steps without arm movements.

Arrive home. Rain stops. No additional thunder.

Big Kona Low like Gypsy Rose Lee, revealing just a little at a time.

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Overhear Husband tell friend about slime in yard. Husband been aware of eight-inch patch of clear gelatinous goo on lawn for weeks but not once mentioned to me. Husband jokes it is alien spawn, invasion to follow. Husband is Star Trek fan so might not be 100% joking. Wonder what other possible “jokes” he has not informed me about.

Open fridge to find dead gecko by produce drawer.

Secret events everywhere—alien slime growing on lawn, gecko darting into fridge, blockage forming in kitchen pipe. All happening outside range of vision and beyond my worrywart imagination.

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Sun still shining but heavy wind commences. Husband brings glass lanterns inside house. Power suddenly out. Notice laptop and phone on low battery. Regret not listening to Glen. Smug Glen and his charged-up devices.

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Drive to Hanalei for food pantry shift. Husband warns to watch for bridge closing. If river level rises to 7.3 feet, bridge closes, no way out of Hanalei. Power in Hanalei still on, no rain at all. Two hours later, temperature drops, spitting rain starts, bridge warning sent. Had not considered water from mountain could cause river level to rise so quickly even when little visible rain below. Staff closes food pantry in five minutes. Rush out of Hanalei to beat bridge closing. Feel surge of adrenalin till safely on other side of bridge. Imagine what experience of real evacuation is like, rushing away from flood, fire, bombs.

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Rain overnight, heavy but not exceptional. In morning, beautiful sunshine. Second wave of Big Kona Low came and went. Or never came but will arrive soon. Feel bored of waiting for weather Godot.

Head to garden. Moringa cutting still upright in ground. Lots of weeding to do. Not many palm branches to clear.

Have thought: What is coming will come. Wind, rain, lightening, rising river, burst pipes, aging bones, death. Cannot be stopped by worry. Waiting for disaster equals time wasted.

Safeguard the lanterns but don’t worry about flying coconuts . . . Or . . . power up cellphones but give no thought to yard goo which is actually harmless slime mold that will not spread and can be removed with a shovel.

Working on the aphorism.

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This is a cautionary tale, not a character assassination.

On the last day of sun before the rains came, a crew of eight or nine cleared out the house of an elderly couple who had to leave the island quickly because of the wife’s dementia and other health problems. The realtor had asked for help because the house was so overrun with stuff that it couldn’t be sold.

The wife who had dementia—let’s call her Eleanor—ran the clothing section of a food pantry here on Kauai’s north shore. Her husband, we’ll call him Walt, ran the food distribution. Walt’s was a big job—organizing, shopping, delivering, setting up, crowd control. Eleanor’s job was to sort clothing, bedding, housewares and toiletry donations and hand them out as needed. Walt and Eleanor had devoted their retirement years to this project, and for Walt, at least, it was nearly a full-time job.

Those of us volunteers at the food pantry already knew Eleanor was a hoarder, but we thought the hoarding was limited to the food pantry building. The clothing and home goods area was always a semi-organized eruption of donations that only grew over time. Never in all the years I’d been there had a plastic bin or shelf been emptied. This was because Eleanor doled things out like she was emptying a swimming pool with a teaspoon.

She was famously reluctant to give blankets and pillows to people living on the beach because the bed linens would get wet when it rained and then people would be back the next week looking for more. “Are you camping?” she’d ask everyone who made such a request. She was the same with toiletries, t-shirts, shorts. Then she’d set out useless things on the check-in desk for people to take as they pleased—old notecards, Tupperware, pencils with pop-pom ends, egg-decorating kits, plastic jewelry for children.

If one of the volunteers advocated for someone to get something that Eleanor had refused them, she’d say, “Then we won’t have it for people who really need it.” Donations lingered and languished and went out of style, waiting years for the Person Who Really Needed It.

Given these long-noted tendencies, the state of Eleanor’s house shouldn’t have shocked us, yet it did. The screened-in porch was lined with plastic bins stacked nearly to the ceiling. The contents were labeled and neatly folded, so neatly folded it broke my heart that no one ever had the pleasure of unfolding them to check the fit. Here there were toiletries, the most-requested and the most low-stock item at the pantry; here there were sheets, blankets, diapers, feminine pads. Presumably Eleanor’s plan was to bring these over to the food pantry bit by bit as supplies ran low, which they never did. Donations were constantly coming in because people move off island, children outgrow clothes, tastes and styles change.

She herself had more clothes—dressers and closets full of matching outfits and dressy dresses—than any one person could wear in a year, especially in Hawaii, where putting on a collared shirt counts as fancy.

The crew worked for hours, carting load after load to trailers and trucks, and we still only got halfway done. There was a lot of head-shaking. “Can you believe this?” gave way to “This is so sad.” Because it wasn’t just habits from a different generation—frugality, mending, saving—that were manifest in those boxes; it was mental illness. At some point hoarding crossed over to dementia. If it had gone on much longer Eleanor would have boxed her and Walt in the house.

Twenty years’ work snuffed out just like that. Twenty years of saving clothes and shoes and shaving cream for Just the Right Person was bundled up and headed to the dump, headed to other donations sites, headed to the beach where it was now raining. What a legacy.

The woman who took over Eleanor’s job, let’s call her Jess, lives on the beach herself and is hoping to clear out the entire collection in a month or two. Shortly before she was whisked off island, Eleanor called the cops on Jess because Jess (who was following someone else’s instructions) bagged up clothes to distribute to people living on the beach. Now Jess has laid claim to a fur coat from Eleanor’s house. Why Eleanor had a fur coat on a tropical island will never be known. But it looks absolutely smashing on Jess and makes her happy.

Poor Eleanor. She was so set on parsing out each donation for Just the Right Occasion and to Just the Right Person, to all the Deserving People, that she missed the little joys that happened after she left. Little girls thrilled with Disney costumes. Dozens of people grateful to have a tote bags. Utensils, a big hit, and the brown foundation a real find for some of the women with darker skin. The clothing area is now open for people to browse and choose what they will. Eleanor’s worst nightmare is a major success for the food pantry.

I don’t intend this as a cautionary tale about hoarding old clothes. Marie Kondo has covered that well; so has the philosophy of Swedish Death Cleaning. I’m thinking about a more abstract kind of hoarding.

After witnessing the sad legacy Eleanor left behind, I can’t help but think about what I’ll leave unused when I make my final exit. What am I holding back and from whom? What stores of time, attention, affection, smiling, laughter, gentleness, patience, and interest do I save for a deserving few on certain special occasions? Am I handing out or merely doling out what Wordsworth called our “little, nameless, unremembered, acts/Of kindness and of love”? As if there’s a limit on what humans can give and who deserves to receive.

Of course we shouldn’t throw our pearls before swine, but neither are we meant to be misers. What is given will be replenished, over and over and over again.

My dad loved the night sky, especially the epic skies from his native Colorado and the dark skies from his years on Navy ships. Whenever he’d talk about the stars and planets and galaxies, he’d say, “God is profligate!” What he meant was, for the sake of beauty, for the sake of awe, for the sake of wonder and delight, God created more than was strictly necessary.

We’d do well to be profligate ourselves.

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I’m 50! 50 Issues Old!

To celebrate my 50th issue, my daughter Anne Marie made a short Super-8 video for me:

If you want to celebrate my 50th issue, please share and subscribe!

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Yet Another Shameless Plug

Anne Marie has a Super-8 business for bands, brands and weddings. Check out her website and keep her in mind if you need super-creative, super-memorable super-8 videos of an event or business!

Here’s a sample of a super-8 she made for the Neil Francis Band:

(I’m unable to embed her actual website here, so click on the link and see what YÉ-YÉ has to offer!)

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Re-boot

Last fall on a walk with my friend Casey, we were discussing how best to co-exist in this age of division, and she offered a tip she picked up from Ryan Holiday, a.k.a. The Daily Stoic. “You don’t have to have an opinion about everything,” she told me.

The heavens opened, the mist cleared, the earth shook, my blinders lifted, and the key to human happiness was thus revealed:

You don’t have to have an opinion about everything.

It’s not that I hadn’t heard this before. I have. Certain people, people who have lived in the sunshine of my constant opinionating for many, many years, have said those exact words—with the additional ornament of an exclamation point. But because Casey was speaking in a general way, and not making a complaint or a criticism, I heard it as if for the first time.

I am one of those unfortunates overloaded with opinions. If you peeled back my scalp a mere inch or two, opinions would spew out like a colony of bats. Years ago I nearly drove everyone out of a book club because I was so “animated.” What they loved I hated; what they were bored by I loved. I have strong opinions about writers, clothes, music, children’s books, health, television shows, politics of course, Miracle Whip (foul), clogs (against), Judy Collins (GOAT), Diet Coke (evil), Brazilians (let it grow, girls), microwaving (only in emergencies), football (watching other people sustain brain damage is not entertainment), and lunch (please don’t invite me to ruin the middle of my day).

Granted, opinions are a writer’s bread-and-butter, but writing and blurting out are two different things. No one needs to hear my unsolicited opinions in conversation. No one will be convinced by them. I’m hard-pressed to think of an occasion when the impulsive airing of my opinions benefited anybody. Much easier to think of times they irritated people.

I looked up Ryan Holiday for more guidance:

Not a lot of people understand this…but you actually don’t have to have an opinion about everything. You don’t have to decide if something is good or bad. Marcus [Aurelius] says limiting the amount of opinions we have is one of the most powerful things we can do in life. Do you need to have an opinion about the scandal of the moment—is it changing anything? Do you need to have an opinion about the way your kid does their hair? So what if this person likes music that sounds weird to you? So what if that person is a vegetarian? “These things are not asking to be judged by you,” ​Marcus writes​. “Leave them alone.”

The Stoic’s idea is to stop opinions before they even form—but that’s a life’s project for a reactive person like me. I need more immediate help to stop opinions at their outlet—to keep my mouth shut so a bat doesn’t fly out and crap all over the dinner party.

I’ve found my role model. The latest episode of All Creatures Great and Small** (Season 6, episode 6), introduced a character named Elijah Wentworth, a farmer who is taciturn to the extreme. As Siegfried, the overly-opinionated, bad-tempered, heart-of-gold vet, complains, “His entire vocabulary consists of three words: aye, ah, and oh.”

I tried the “aye, ah, oh” response for a few minutes with Husband, and while it was amusingly effectual, the “aye’s” did not exactly trip off my tongue, as I am not a native of the Yorkshire Dales. So I’ve assembled my own arsenal of anodyne phrases. Hopefully they’ll be useful when the compulsion to opine takes hold. The phrases are borrowed from others (and a good story behind many of them) so feel free to borrow them too.

1. For any political conversation you get drawn into and want to exit quickly from, say as neutrally as possible,

   That’s one way to put it.

2. When someone is telling you that ever since they turned their internet off at night, they’ve been thinking clearly and sleeping like a baby, do not snort and make the crazy sign with your finger circling your head. Instead say,

   If it works, it works!

3. When someone is talking about the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics and tells you the two are incompatible which means we’re missing something and then asks what you make of all that, do not say, “Bor-ing!” Try instead,

   Hard to say without knowing, really.

4. When someone complains that all their co-workers are missing the point, don’t say, “Have you considered that it might be you missing the point?” Just say,

   It is what it is.

5. When someone is telling you that because Mercury is in retrograde and the moons of Jupiter are sitting in the Delta of Venus, they are going to get a foot massage and a new bicycle, resist the urge to tell them their brain is in retrograde. Instead say,

   There ya go!

6. When someone tries to engage you in a discussion about macroeconomics and the gold standard and international monetary policy, and you think this person should probably just load the dishwasher, keep your thoughts to yourself and say,

   I hear ya.

7. When that same person tells you at length about a recent golf game, each birdie, each bogey, each putt, each missed opportunity, and you notice that the dishwasher still needs to be loaded, say nothing except,

   It’s so hard.

**Note: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the original All Creatures Great and Small series from the 70’s and 80’s is loads better than the new one. Less hokey, a more manic Siegfried, and more realistic locals (less attractive, stronger accents, quirkier). However, if you really love the new one. . . I hear ya!

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Re-Book

Up until about six or seven years ago, I was a reader. An obsessive, voracious reader.

I read everything that crossed my path, like a dog gobbling a trail of kibble. As a young girl I read in the bathroom late into the night; in school I got in trouble for reading a novel instead of my textbook; every day I’d read the entire Washington Star and Washington Post, even the classifieds. As a young mother I’d check out a dozen books from the library, just for myself, and pile them up on the living room floor, holding off the kids’ requests for snacks or attention with, “One more page!”

Years later a smart phone had the usual effect. Little by little my identity as an avid reader faded away. It was as if “avid reader” was a costume I was taking off piece by piece, leaving me exposed me as a Non-Reader.

It fills me with shame to be a Non-Reader.

Obviously part of the solution to reading more is to scroll less. That’s an ongoing battle. But eliminating screen time is not necessarily going to drive me back into the arms of a book. Just because you give up sweets doesn’t mean you eat salad greens all the day long.

Recently I read an essay that’s helped. In “How I Began to Love Reading Again,” writer Jeff Giles introduces the idea of “the broken reader,” a term he got from a writer friend who had also stopped reading for a time.

It took weeks for me to realize that I was a broken reader. I assumed I’d just had a streak of bad luck in the Dept. of Picking. I started taking fewer chances. I bought only books that looked like books I would buy. This backfired in a kind of horror-movie sequence during which I brought a novel home; gave up on it within 20 pages; and then carried it to a bookshelf, where I discovered that — cue the jagged violins — I’d already bought a copy and not liked it.

I tried that too, and now I have half a shelf of unread essay collections and Virago Modern Classics.

What finally worked for Giles was trying to approach a book with more expectation than dread:

Without realizing it, I had put every novelist on probation from word one. I needed to stop thinking that I knew more than the author and give in to whatever ride they had spent years planning. I needed to read slowly and remind myself that if I ended up disliking a book the earth wouldn’t get sucked into the sun.

Yep and yep. I’m a quick judger of most things I experience (Enneagram type 1, IYKYN). Keeping an open mind is always wise, but it didn’t solve my reading avoidance.

What has helped is the very concept of “the broken reader.” Thinking of myself as a broken reader means that I can repair my habits; I’ll get back to it; I’ll read again. But more than that, it means that despite these many years of not reading, I am still in my heart a reader. That’s who I am. And readers read.

It’s a subtle shift, but somehow it’s working. Thinking of myself in this kindly way has led to more reading in 2026 than for most of 2025. Since January I finished a book I started months ago, Memento Mori by Muriel Spark (a quirky and hilarious story of elderly folks getting prank calls about their imminent deaths); Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd (a cozy, undemanding British mystery); Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz (best thing I’ve read in a while, a portrait of L.A. in the 70’s); and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (see Issue #48). I’m working on three more simultaneously: All the Beauty in the World (listening to it on Audible—thanks to my friends Joan and Tanya —it’s a wonderful memoir by a guard at the MET); Secret Hours by Mick Herron (I’m a sucker for British spy thrillers); and The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by James Martin, SJ (a good book for the bathroom).

Next up is a re-read of Wuthering Heights (anyone else?) and a return to Mr. Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo, which I started, enjoyed, and for no good reason at all abandoned.

This new energy for reading is nothing short of a grace, and I am grateful for it.

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Musophobia is the name for the fear of rodents, a fear I suspect is near universal. There should be a corresponding term for the fascination and weird shiver of delight we get from hearing rodent stories, because that too, seems near universal. How about musomania? I recently experienced musomania listening to a story about a rat-infested townhouse in Georgetown. The residents had to put dumbbells on the toilet lids to keep rats from coming up the pipe. And my sister Josie had a great tale about a rat that nested under her couch in a group home in New Orleans. When the roommates discovered the rat’s nest, they also discovered missing jewelry the rat had stolen.

I’ve got rodents on the brain, you see, because I’m in the middle of a novel that features scads of them. Waves and buckets and shovel-fulls of mice. The narrator of Charlotte Woods’ Stone Yard Devotional has taken refuge in a cloistered convent in Australia. Her refuge turns out to be anything but peaceful. An infestation of mice takes over the convent. There are mice in the piano, mice in the cushions of the car, mice in her shoes. They skitter, they gnaw, they smell. They destroy the pantry, they scurry behind walls, they eat each other’s faces off.

The novel is set during Australia’s great mice plague of 2021. Yes, this is a real thing. A plague of mice hits Australia every couple years and causes millions in damage to crops. It’s absolutely and delightfully disgusting:

We hear stories from further north in the state: mice in babies’ nappies; women going to bed with pillows over their faces to stop the creatures crawling on them as they sleep. Children bitten in their hospital beds.

The other plot line in the novel revolves around the bones of a murdered nun, returned after many years to the convent. A small casket containing the bones sits in the “good room” as the nuns wait, days upon days, for permission to bury the bones on convent grounds. They keep vigil to pay respect, but also to keep the mice—who will chew through anything— from getting to the bones:

We are doing everything we can to avoid trapping in the bones’ room. There would be something very wrong, we feel, about such violence near Sister Jenny’s coffin. But soon we will have no choice. Every morning [Sister] Bonaventure sets the wire-and-plastic traps outside the room, either side of the door, before she goes in there to sit. And within minutes the traps are heard snapping in the hallway.

The grotesque possibility of mice eating human remains took me back to something I wrote over twenty years ago, a few months after my bilateral mastectomy. I began to wonder what happened to my breasts. These days I would just Google, “What happens to breast tissue after mastectomy?” thereby ruining my algorithm forever, but back then, internet research wasn’t the first option that came to mind.

The piece I’m sharing with you today is only mildly gruesome, I promise. I’ve edited it a little and removed (no pun intended) a section on an imaginary bosom funeral. If you’re especially squeamish, this may not be for you; and if you’ve recently dealt with cancer, please protect your peace of mind and skip to the last sections where something much more pleasant is on offer.

*

I start with my oncologist. “What happened to my breast tissue?” I ask. I use the term “breast tissue” to sound more clinical and less cuckoo-crazy.

He says he doesn’t know exactly. “Exactly” tells me he does indeed know something. He’s still leaning back in his chair, but his usual languid demeanor has an edge now. He asks why I want to know. Either I’ve broken some taboo or he’s worried I’m developing an abnormal attachment to my amputated body parts, like the specter in the old story who chants, “Johnny, I’m on the first step and I want my liver back.”

I say, “I’m writing about it.”

This seems to reassure him that I’m involved in a healthy healing process, and he decides to tell me a little more. After a mastectomy, he says, slides are made of both the diseased and the healthy tissues. A finger-tip sized sample of each is put in wax. These specimens are stored at a hospital warehouse for fifty years.

There’s something more. “I’ve heard from the men who work at the warehouse that after a while—”

“What’s a while?”

“I don’t know, a long while. After a long while,” he goes on, probably already regretting the over-share, “mice get to the waxed samples.”

I make a face. I imagine hungry mice scrambling along shelves and in and out of drawers, nibbling on thousands of nipples and breast tissue samples.

Then I realize that a finger-tip sample is still only part of the whole. “What about the rest of it?”

He repeats that he doesn’t know, leaving out “exactly” this time. He suggests I call the surgeon’s office. So I call the surgeon’s office. They pass me on to the lab. I make several more phone calls. No one seems to know the answer. Or no one wants to say. But every person I speak to wants to know why I want to know. I stick to “I’m writing about it,” but what I feel like saying is, why shouldn’t I want to know? Isn’t that a normal response to losing an important part of your body? Why the secrecy?

Finally I get a hold of a pathologist willing to spill the beans. First she tells me that the breast tissue is kept for four weeks and then disposed of in a “medically approved way.”

“What does that mean?”

She pauses. “Do you have any idea?” There is something she doesn’t want to say out loud.

“Incineration?”

“No,” she says, “we stopped doing that years ago. Now, if it were a limb, it would be sent to the funeral home that handles limb disposal.”

It’s too bad she’s about to tell me that my breasts weren’t sent to a funeral home. It’s too bad, really, that the boneless tissue of my mammary glands won’t receive the same respect as a foot or a finger. Because they were important, they were useful. Didn’t they nurse four babies, each baby for a whole year? Hats off, I say, props to that!

Instead I ask, “So where does it go?”

A pause on the other end. “It goes down the drain.”

I understand immediately that before the breast tissue goes down the drain, it has to be liquefied in a garbage disposal.

She confirms this. “It’s a called a ‘grind-out’ and it’s done in the autopsy room.”

“And where does that liquid go?” I’m imagining a secret cesspool of liquified flesh fenced off behind the hospital.

Fortunately she tells me that’s not the case. The liquefied tissue is sent to some kind of treatment facility. “But it doesn’t end up in our drinking water,” she reassures me.

I stop asking questions.

I have a brief gross-out moment thinking about the grind-out. Blood and flesh chopped up in sharp blades till a mauve-colored smoothie spills into a storage tank.

Then it occurs to me that the treatment facility de-toxifies. It purifies. The cancer in my breasts has been neutralized.

I adjust my imaginings of my breasts in their liquid state. This time they’re distilled and clarified, light as water, with an amber glow that captures the sun like a prism. My golden breasts flow out of a pipe and sink into the earth, maybe to help, once again, young things grow. Or maybe just to rest benignly in the soil, not killing any living thing. That’s all I really need to know.

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A Few More Rodents

Musomaniacs will enjoy re-visiting Beatrix Potter stories. Forget about the bunny nursery wallpaper and the kitten-in-dresses onesies—Potter is much darker than that. Let’s call her Edward Gorey Lite. Remember Peter Rabbit, nearly turned into a pie? Remember Farmer McGregor chasing him around the garden with a pitchfork? That gal was twisted, in the best way. Her darkest story, and my favorite, is The Roly-Poly Pudding in which a kitten is caught by rats and rolled in pastry to eat for dinner:

Presently the rats came back and set to work to make him into a dumpling. First they smeared him with butter, and then they rolled him in the dough.

“Will not the string be very indigestible, Anna Maria?” inquired Samuel Whiskers.

Anna Maria said she thought that it was of no consequence; but she wished that Tom Kitten would hold his head still, as it disarranged the pastry. She laid hold of his ears.

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Rodent-Free Content

Should anyone need a love poem for Valentine’s Day, here’s a sweet old-fashioned one by William H. Davies:

Come, Let Us Find

Come, let us find a cottage, love,
That's green for half a mile around;
To laugh at every grumbling bee,
Whose sweetest blossom's not yet found.
Where many a bird shall sing for you,
And in your garden build its nest:
They'll sing for you as though their eggs
Were lying in your breast,
      My love—
Were lying warm in your soft breast.

'Tis strange how men find time to hate,
When life is all too short for love;
But we, away from our own kind,
A different life can live and prove.
And early on a summer's morn,
As I go walking out with you,
We'll help the sun with our warm breath
To clear away the dew,
      My love,
To clear away the morning dew. 

The best lines in the whole poem, worth holding on to:

‘Tis strange how men find time to hate,

When life is all too short for love

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“Chintamani” by Celine Dessberg is my new morning song. And my afternoon break song. And my after-dinner song. The instrument giving it an other-worldly beauty is the Mongolian zither-harp.

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On our drive to the beach we saw a red helicopter circling overhead. We knew what it was looking for.

“That poor family,” we said to each other. “Still no body.”

Then we forgot about it, the way one does on a beautiful Saturday afternoon when chores are done and the sun is out but not too hot and there’s nothing to do but study the waves and look for whales.

Near us a roly-poly elderly man was wading into the water to snorkel. He wore a yellow flotation vest that fit like a brassiere. Flippers in hand, also yellow, he steadied himself with poles— “Are those hiking poles?” we wondered, never having seen such a thing used in the ocean—as he hobbled forward, ankle-deep, then shin-deep. “This is not going to go well,” we observed, with equal parts snark and concern for his safety because the current was stronger than usual.

All the sudden three jet skis skirted around him and pulled up on the beach. Four men hopped off and unstrapped a long white bag from a sled attached to back of one of the jet skis.

The bag sagged in the middle and seemed heavy. Even so the men moved quickly up the narrow beach as if they didn’t want the body to stay in the ocean one second longer than necessary, quickly because they wanted to return it to a family who lived in an agony of waiting. Police parked on the road—we hadn’t noticed them till now, they had arrived silently—took the delivery.

Three days earlier a young man, only 19, was swept off the rocks at nearby Kahili Beach along with a friend. It was a terrible story. They were fishing with a group. One fisherman was rescued, the other not. His friends, unable to save him, had watched him struggle to swim back to the rocks. Then they lost sight of him. The search had been extensive: divers, drones, helicopters.

It all must have happened so quickly. It happened quickly on our end too, the jet skis landing, the body pulled out of the water and rushed off the beach—it was as if we watched his fall in reverse, the way people film themselves jumping into the water and play the tape backward to show themselves jumping out of the water

It was when the search-and-rescue team was ready to leave that the tragic turned to the absurd. The old man, now face down in the shallow water, hovered right behind the jet skis. One of the crew tapped him to get out of the way, but he didn’t look up. When he was tapped a second time, he emerged to hear their request, but went right back to snorkeling, not moving his position at all. The jet skis had to maneuver around him.

His lack of awareness was so extreme that it seemed intentional, selfish, rude. I felt a mild outrage at his lack of decency. It was easier, I suppose, to feel irritated than to feel the full weight of a young man drowned.

Later it occurred to me that the scene we witnessed was Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” come to life. I don’t remember when I first read this poem—high school or college—but it’s stayed with me all these years. The speaker of the poem is looking at pictures in a gallery and meditating on just the kind of obliviousness the old man had demonstrated:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

The poem turns to one particular picture as an example of the “human position” of suffering: Bruegel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus. (Icarus, you recall, of Greek myth, flew too close to the sun and his wax wings melted. He fell into the sea and drowned.)

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 
But for him it was not an important failure

Could there be a better description of the snorkeler than this: “everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster”? Or, in point of fact, a better description of my own actions? Hadn’t I turned away and gone back to my book once the jet skis sped away, hadn’t I turned away from the old man himself, from his likely suffering, hadn’t I made fun of him? Not to equate the expected infirmities of old age with the loss of a young man, but even the smallest bit of imagination would have brought the old man’s situation into focus: painful joints, loss of hearing, confusion, weak muscles, possible loneliness, and expectation of death sooner than later.

I’m not beating myself up about it—as Auden says, turning away is as human and as old as our myths. I’m just aware that turning away or turning towards, that is, seeing or not seeing others’ suffering, is a choice we make. We can’t choose one or the other exclusively—balance is necessary. If we only saw suffering, we would be overwhelmed, we couldn’t live. We can’t all be Dorothy Days or Greg Boyles.

But if we choose to not see suffering, if more often than not we choose our own comfort and amusement, what kind of life is that? What shallow waters do we float in, how isolated and how foolish are we in our protective gear, in our masks, waiting for the next pretty fish to dart past?

*

Here’s the full poem:

Musée des Beaux Arts
by W.H. Auden, December 1938

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I happened upon a wonderful close reading of the poem from a few years back. Entertaining, insightful and interesting. Well worth a few minutes!

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On the lighter side

I’ve been nonstop listening to Volfman and Jackie Evan’s “Sleep for Days.” It has the just right blend of sweet melancholy and gotta-dance to it. Also, these lines—

Every time I go upstate I sleep for days
Maybe I just get tired when I’m feeling safe 

make me think of my adult children coming home and how I’d love to tuck them in as I used to, and close the door and feel happy they were resting well.

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One more song recommendation and also a shameless plug for my niece Mary Grace Hathway who just wrote and recorded this wonderful tune, “Agnes.”

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I told her I wanted to write more and she asked what about and I said I wanted to be the Sister Wendy of something. That is, I wanted to be a writer who held up a subject/object/idea/creation for others to see and show them why it’s beautiful or interesting so they can enter into the wonder of it as well. What that something would be was less important than the sharing of it.

In case you don’t remember Sister Wendy or never heard of her, here’s a short bio: Sister Wendy was a cloistered Carmelite nun who late in life became an art ambassador. She made art documentaries for BBC which were re-broadcast on PBS. She spoke with a lisp, wore voluminous black robes and a wimple that covered all but her cheerful bespectacled face. She lived as a hermit in a blue caravan in the woods, praying most of the day and writing her many books during a two-hour break. She died in 2018 at age 88.

The charm of Sister Wendy is not her expertise but her enthusiasm. She is moved and delighted and curious by what she encounters. The mismatch between her garrulous enthusiasm—especially for sexual subjects—and her simple life of chastity and silence makes her screen persona all the more magnetic.

Today I’m fulfilling the wish I made to Josie—in the most literal way I can. I polled a few art lovers I know and asked them what their favorite painting is and why. I’m sharing the results so you can perchance love what they love. Or see something new in a piece of art you thought you knew well. Or take interest where you once had none.

I was delighted by the variety of selections, and glad to be introduced to some paintings I’ve never seen before. But the best part of this project was the glimpse into the private yearnings and dreams of the respondents. Aren’t people a wonder! What beautiful treasures they hold in their hearts!

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Sharon, Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

While I hesitate to choose such a well-known painting — I have loved this one for a long time and have never tired of it.

Although the dark tree in the foreground feels vaguely foreboding, the quaint village with its church steeple seems to bely any fear. The swirling wind of the illuminated night sky feels like hope and spirit — something joyful coming in to start the day.

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Molly, The House Opposite by Leonora Carrington

I’ve been studying dreamwork for the past two years, and recently I’ve really fallen in love with Leonora Carrington’s paintings. They’re full of dream imagery and surreal symbolism, but feel distinctly more feminine than much of the Surrealist work we usually see or study. Working with dreams has made me especially curious about what our inner worlds look like (a lot going on!), and I’m fascinated by attempts to express that through painting. The House Opposite was the first of her works that caught my attention, and led me to exploring more of her life and practice.

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Mary K., a memory of a painting by an unknown artist

Actually, my favorite painting is by a no-name that I saw in a gallery years ago in the building where my doctor’s office was. Whenever I had an appointment, I would go in and just absorb it for as long as I could. It was a large, vertical painting of storm clouds, many layers, with an area that was lightening up. I love clouds. I love storm clouds. And I love when the sun comes out—

Painting was similar to:

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Joan, Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel

I love the image of God touching Adam’s finger —creation, so touching. No bad pun intended! Also, it’s astoundingly beautiful and to think Michelangelo painted it lying on his back on a scaffolding is incredible. I’m hardly an art connoisseur but we were lucky enough to have a semi-private, after-hours tour of the Sistine Chapel—and as many times as I’ve seen it, I’ve always found it completely awesome and humbling too.

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Sarah, Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons by J.M.W. Turner

I think my favorite artist is J.M.W. Turner, especially for his more abstract paintings. The thing that draws me to them the most is the colors, especially his ones of sunsets or fires. I love how they all mix together to create the dream-like atmospheres. I like how it feels like a modern take on classic world settings/landscapes.

. . . I originally looked into Turner because I love the song “The Art Teacher” by Rufus Wainwright. [See below for more on that song.]

Also, I really like Hilma af Klint. I saw an exhibit of her paintings at the Guggenheim when I first moved to New York. It’s my favorite museum. The colors in her paintings are also amazing and use a lot of pink, which is probably my favorite color. The designs just seem fun, but then when I found out they relate to esoteric teachings, I was obsessed. Obviously, I’m attracted to anything a little bit Swedish and a little bit mystic. I know she used to participate in seances.

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Kathy, The Japanese Footbridge by Claude Monet

The Monet paintings always come to mind as some of my absolute life-long favorites. Having visited his home and garden in Giverny outside of Paris a few times, along with seeing his works in many world-famous museums and with a large assortment of his incredible works at Musee D’Orsay, I love the green Japanese bridge as an iconic representation of his works, the colors and the patterns.

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Trish, The White Cat by Pierre Bonnard

[Edited for length—wish I could include it all—Trish is a fantastic writer!]

Here’s one of my faves, The White Cat by Pierre Bonnard. It reminds me of the cat fights, rather cat encounters, that I’ve seen over the years, a memorable one in the early ’70’s.

[Trish goes on to describe a street scene she witnessed from an upper window in a house in Annapolis. A cat she named Ivan the Terrible traded growls and yowls with a black cat.]

Ivan paused and his body began morphing, assuming this faux-menacing, ruffled-fur, arched-back, stiff-legged, twisted stance that, if it had never actually vanquished an enemy had surely baffled at least a few of them to death. The black cat began doing the same thing.

[Eventually they both back down.]

All fights should end like this, I remember thinking, with paw-grooming and yawning over nothing.

I look at Bonnard’s cat in that spirit, and in that spirit I wish I could have that idyllic day back again, down to its infernal heat, hairy legs, and in-name-only adversaries. Put me back there with Ivan and the world can go about its risky business and the sky collapse over us like popped gum. I won’t care. I’ll have Ivan in my lap.

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Lisa M., Thirty Years or La Vie en Rose by Raoul Dufy

I was introduced to this painting during a trip to Paris, only within the last 5 -6 years. It drew me in initially because of the brilliance of color. Pink will get me every time. But more than that, it was the feeling of optimism that came over me, which I had not felt in years. The kind of innocent optimism that came in childhood. The feeling of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, something I used to be accused of but sadly no longer applies.

Anyway, I keep a photo of this painting in my room to remind me of the girl who always thought of brighter days ahead.

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Joseph, The Wedding at Cana, by Paolo Veronese

[Edited for length. FYI Joseph and his brothers are fantastic musicians—their band Hathway is on Spotify and all other music outlets. “Keeper of Time”is one of my favorites and features their sister Mary Grace on vocals. Give it a listen!]

I love this gargantuan painting for its bursting color, relentless detail, and historical significance.

It is the largest painting in the Louvre at a whopping 7x10 meters. Hard to imagine the level of focus required to complete this, yet Veronese balanced an extensive palette and breathed life into over 130 figures within 18 months.

. . . Today it’s displayed directly opposite the Mona Lisa, so Veronese’s masterpiece is often overlooked. Yet it caught Napoleons’ attention in 1798; he plundered it during his Italian campaign and brought it to France for his personal collection. I can’t quite blame him—The Wedding at Cana would tempt me too.

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Michelle, Sitting Woman with Legs Drawn Up by Egon Schiele

My fav because I love the expressive linework and the unfinished quality —hints at the mystery of the piece and who she is! I’ve always loved figure drawings since usually the identity of the person remains unknown. Just cool to see his interpretation of her and I want to know more!!!

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Shemaiah, Mulberry Tree by Vincent Van Gogh

[Edited for length but you can link to the full essay. Shemaiah is a wonderful writer and art-appreciator. She has a book out, Undaunted Joy.

The story of her favorite painting begins with her first-ever trip to a museum as a high school student in LA. She comes upon a Van Gogh painting and stops in her tracks.]

The painting was simply a picture of a tree. The branches and leaves twisted in yellow, gold, and orange. The colors were nearly violent in the way the yellows of the tree contrasted against the cobalt blue of the sky. The tree moved. It pulsated. It vibrated. There were no figures in the painting. No story to engage. Not even a dog squatting by the tree. And yet I felt that the painting told me a secret about its artist, whose name I didn’t know at the time, and that the painting knew secrets about me too, secrets it found beautiful and lovely.

I wanted to sob—deep guttural sobs of relief and knowing. But I was in a public place, a quiet place. So instead, I took in a deep breath and let it out very slowly to control my reaction. I didn’t expect such a visceral response to art. It felt like an assault but at the same time, the sweetest pain.

. . . A closer look at the painting revealed thick, dense brushstrokes. In some places, Van Gogh globbed paint directly on the canvas, using a technique called “impasto.” Without thinning or diluting it, he pushed the paint around with his brush or, in this case, the handle of his brush. Even after 130 years, there is a wet quality to the painting.

The result is exuberant. The tree appears as if it is on fire. The tree trembles as if it represents Van Gogh’s own state of mind, shuddering with the lack of control he had of his own tremors.

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Lizzie, Dance by Henri Matisse

I love the grandeur and size of the painting [over 8’ x 12’], how the top dancers are almost smushed into the canvas, it’s almost like a gesture painting quick and simple and naked and unpretentious. . . how one dancer appears to have lost balance and is pulled along in the circle, there’s so much movement and it’s evocative of my idea of heaven on earth.

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Anne Marie, The Nut-Gatherers by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

[Edited for length and excessive flattery to me!]

I have many favorite paintings, but none are tied to a memory as clearly as “The Nut Gatherers”—a painting my mom pointed out years ago when she took my best friend Alex and me to the DIA [Detroit Institute of the Arts]. “You two look just like them!” she said, before having us lie on the museum floor to recreate the girls in the painting above us. At the time, we probably thought that was the end of it.

Until the day I was leaving for college. This time, Alex and I dressed the part— long skirts, ribbons, and (of course) nuts in hand—lying in our neighbor’s yard. . . .

. . . That photograph of Alex and me always reminds me of my mom’s way of leaning into life—leaning into ideas and pushing them into reality. I’m grateful for how many memories of mine were made possible simply because she insisted on making them real.

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Lisa G., Sixteenth Century Renaissance Painting by an unknown Italian artist

I remember seeing this painting during an Art History class while in college. I was immediately taken aback by the way the artist depicted the clouds. Aside from that there is something about the people that seemed so familiar…. It was almost as though I was back in time and knew them.

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Michele, The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt

I like this painting. There is no doorknob on Jesus’ side because we have to open the door.

[Interesting factoid: Poet Christina Rossetti, a favorite of mine, was one of the models for the Christ figure. This from an essay on Rossetti in Acton Institute

As the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt was working on The Light of the World (1851–1854), his portrayal of Jesus knocking on a vine-covered door, he found perhaps an unlikely model for the face of Christ: Christina Rossetti, the sister of his fellow Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel. Hunt admired her “gravity and sweetness of expression,” and thus thought this young woman perfect to convey the Savior’s gentle persistence on the door of the human heart.]

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Rosemary, Morning on the Seine, by Claude Monet

I remember seeing this painting at The Met for the first time and my soul swooned. I loved the purple sunrise, the quiet beauty and promise of a new day. In the midst of New York City, I stayed in that stillness as long as I could.

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Colleen, Mother and Child by Gloria Vanderbilt

I’m a huge history buff and particularly love Gilded Age, Downton Abbey-style history and the Vanderbilts. My oldest daughter Devin is aware of this and has purchased books about and by Gloria V and her son Anderson Cooper for me.

On Devin’s wedding day she presented me with a numbered copy of Gloria Vanderbilt’s painting Mother and Child (although it’s said to actually be her with her beloved nanny). I love this painting so much, it signifies the love between the mother (nanny) and child and my interest in the artist’s history. It’s hanging in my bedroom where I can see it every day.

[Had no idea Gloria Vanderbilt was an artist!]

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Maureen, Paris by Alexis Bruchon

I was drawn to the tall terrace windows showcasing a fantasy of Paris and New York, side by side, at a gallery in my neighborhood a few years ago. The mid-century cartoon-like style brings together two worlds, and reminds me we can create the spaces we occupy.

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My own: Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket by James Whistler

Nocturne is at the Detroit Institute of Arts, so I see it every couple years. I can be a little thick with the obvious, so at first I didn’t understand it was a painting of fireworks. I just took it in, transfixed by the beauty, the deep blue-blacks, the shivers of gold drifting down the canvas, the red specks here and there. Was it abstract? I didn’t categorize, I just loved it and felt full of emotion in front of it.

Later, when I understood the painting depicted a firework’s aftermath (must have finally read the full title), I was drawn to it in a different way. Now I appreciate the quiet of the scene. It’s those seconds after the boom and pop of a big firework and before the next explosion comes. I sense the soft crackling of embers just before they disappear into the night. For me it’s a painting of a moment in between, a moment to collect yourself and breathe in the near-silence.

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Sarah Gives a Song Rec

from Sarah, fan of Turner and Klint:

I’m a sucker for a song that tells a story. It’s good for daydreaming and drinking wine. If you don’t know “The Art Teacher” by Rufus Wainwright, it’s about a schoolgirl in a uniform who is in love with her young art teacher. He takes them on a field trip to The Met, and he tells her his favorite painter is Turner. Then years later when she’s in a loveless but financially advantageous marriage, she buys a Turner and thinks about him. I listen to this song a lot and so to get even more visual with my daydreams, I looked into what Turner paintings look like. I really recommend the song if you haven’t heard it!

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I’d love to hear about your favorite paintings—please share in the comments below.

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He’s right—those posts garner the fewest hits of any. But as he well knows, I follow my own lead. There will be poetry today.

But hold on—don’t leave just yet—here’s me extending my hand to draw you in and offer you a comfortable chair and a cuppa. Here’s me assuring you that “Marriage”” is an easy poem to read, and an interesting one, a little vignette about a wife telling her husband a story about their courtship that he had never heard before.

The poem centers around a series of phone calls, so it’s important to know that Lawrence Raab’s poem was published in Poetry magazine way back in 1990. “Marriage” operates in a pre-cellphone and pre-caller ID world. It’s a landline poem.

Settle in, this will only take a moment to read:

Marriage
by Lawrence Raab

Years later they find themselves talking   
about chances, moments when their lives   
might have swerved off
for the smallest reason.
                                     What if
I hadn’t phoned, he says, that morning?   
What if you’d been out,
as you were when I tried three times   
the night before?
                           Then she tells him a secret.   
She’d been there all evening, and she knew   
he was the one calling, which was why   
she hadn’t answered.
                               Because she felt—
because she was certain—her life would change   
if she picked up the phone, said hello,   
said, I was just thinking
of you.
            I was afraid,
she tells him. And in the morning   
I also knew it was you, but I just   
answered the phone
                            the way anyone
answers a phone when it starts to ring,   
not thinking you have a choice.

*

I’m resurrecting this poem and my commentary on it from a blog post twelve years past. (The idea behind my old blog, Poem Elf, was to bring poetry out of books and into the world. I would place copies of poems in public spaces and write about them. “Marriage” landed on the entry pillar of a very expensive bridal salon.)

I’m going to share my 2014 interpretation (slightly edited and updated), and then I’ll tell you how I found out said interpretation was a whole lot of misguided yackety-yak.

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From Poem Elf December 2014:

If the couple in this poem had courted more recently, he would have called her cellphone, then texted, voice messaged and checked her location. There would be no we-almost-lost-each-other-forever. Either he would have tracked her down or he would have known she was ignoring his calls.

But even with the outdated technology of the poem, his version is overly-romanticized. We don’t know the whole story, of course, but surely he would have kept trying to reach her after she didn’t answer. Surely there would have been another opportunity to connect before their lives/might have swerved off/for the smallest reason.

Years later, happy years it would seem, she demolishes his version of their love story. It turns out that the single moment when their lives might swerve off course is not the missed phone calls so many years ago, but the telling of her secret this late in their relationship. It wasn’t kismet, she tells him, it was a choice, at first a conscious one formed in fear, and then an unconscious one formed out of habit.

You can just see the poor fellow’s face fall. It’s not devastating news, but it’s deflating. He doesn’t know her as well as he thought. His treasured romantic-comedy relationship is going to have to be re-cast.

It reminds me of the last beautiful scene in James’ Joyce’s The Dead. Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta are in their hotel room after his aunts’ annual holiday party. As he takes her in his arms, he asks, because she seems distracted, “’Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?’” She doesn’t want to answer him, but he presses her, and at last she says, “’O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim.’” Then she throws herself on the bed, sobbing.

Earlier at the party Gabriel had watched Gretta at the top of the stairs listening to that song played in a distant room. He couldn’t decipher her strange expression, but it excited him. Now she explains. She tells him a story she’d never told him before, just as the wife in the poem does. When she was a young girl, she and a sickly boy named Michael Furey fell in love. He would sing “The Lass of Aughrim” to her. The night before she was leaving home for school, he came outside her window in the rain and told her he did not want to live if she left. He died a week later.

After this revelation Gretta falls asleep. Gabriel is left alone, humiliated, angry, then by turns tender and wistful. Just before the story ends with the immortal lines about the snow falling faintly and faintly falling upon all the living and the dead, there’s this:

He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love

That’s marriage, right there, that acceptance that your spouse is a separate person from you and not exactly the person you thought they were early in your romance when imagination and fantasy were so much at play.

Years ago when my husband and I were moving to Michigan and arguing about every house we looked at, our 80-year-old realtor, now long dead but at the time long-married, told us that married people are like two trees. She used her forearms to show us the trees side by side. Separate trees, Millie said, but always growing beside each other. She was right. Any happily married person will tell you it takes years of marriage for the old idea of who you married to make room for the actual person who shares your bed and sometimes farts in it.

The title of Raab’s poem covers not just this little vignette of a married couple’s life, but what happens after the poem ends. Yes, marriage can be the bliss of shared memories, but it’s also the negotiation of differing memories. Romance is a construct; marriage is what happens after deconstruction. Or doesn’t. We don’t know where this marriage is headed.

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Confident of my analysis, not having a single doubt about my interpretation, I forwarded the post to the poet, Lawrence Raab. He was kind enough to answer, and even kinder to gently set me straight.

Because I had gotten it all wrong.

Mr. Raab wrote, “I’m glad you like the poem, although I have never thought that he would be deflated by her story; it’s too good a story, and her reason for not initially answering relates directly to him.”

In a subsequent email he told me that he heard the poem is often used at weddings. In other words, most people read the poem as a hopeful, romantic one.

I had made it all sound so dreary.

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Years ago one of my daughters lived with my mother for a few months. Rosemary liked to ask her questions about her life, usually while they were watching a television show. “Grandma, how did you know Grandpa was The One? How did you decide to marry him?” My mom’s answers weren’t satisfactory, so Rosemary would keep asking until finally my mother would say, amused and a little exasperated, “I don’t know, Rosemary, I just did it!”

I can hear exactly how she said that, and I can imagine what she was thinking: It all worked out, what more is there to say? My mom was a happy person and not an over-thinker. Those two qualities are probably related.

We live in an age of near constant decision-making, of curated lifestyles and life choices, an age of being intentional. I’m not wholesale disparaging this. The italics are for term-recognition, not for scorn. I fully realize how many unexamined lives have been unhappy. I know I would not want to live in an age where only one kind of life was expected and you followed along without questioning. I admire people who live thoughtfully, who think things through and make hard, interesting and/or good decisions.

But there are other forces at work in our lives, forces under-valued, mysterious, and waiting in the wings to help us move forward. Forces of instinct and trust. Instinct towards what is good and trust that good awaits.

I heard something recently that would have resonated with my mother: Make a decision and then make it work. Over-thinking is eventually exhausting and paralyzing and a dead-end.

Because sometimes you just need to pick up the phone.

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Joyce’s The Dead is such a beautiful story, and I always think of it when snow falls. For you snow-lovers, here’s that famous last paragraph to increase your enjoyment of the weather:

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

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Here’s Angelica Huston in John Huston’s The Dead in the scene where she hears “The Lass of Aughrim.”

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This being the end of the year and time to plot out 2026 resolutions, I decided to look around for evidence of other abandoned self-improvement projects so as not to repeat my mistakes. I didn’t have to look very hard.

A motley collection of supplements and vitamins, opened and abandoned, sat on the counter adjacent to the walnuts. I had bottles of magnesium, calcium, moringa, biotin, and vitamins D + K because that combination was supposed to be essential for absorption of something else that was even more essential. So essential that the bottle was still full, and whatever it was that I was supposed to absorb was long ago flushed from my system.

A stack of five books was piled up on my nightside tabletop, selected to reduce screen time. They’d been there for months, moved only for dusting. A dozen more were stuffed into the drawer and shelf of the nightstand—mostly novels, but also two poetry books, and the ubiquitous Mel Robbins’ tome Let Them. Pfft—the only thing I had Let Them do was take my money for a book I barely skimmed.

Six more books were hidden on the far side of the couch so that Husband would not say, “Why do you keep buying books you don’t read?”

My small bathroom countertop and drawers were crowded with jars of retinol, eye de-puffing creams, neck tighteners, and serums that had particular purposes which escaped me at the moment. What was inescapable was the fact that my face looked the same as it had this time last year. Slightly droopier, if you’re going to be a stickler about it. Had I used the products as directed or at least with a smidgen of regularity, I might be less droopy.

A jar of Bedtime Bliss and a tincture called Peace of Mind were supposed to help with my sleep problems, but I forgot I owned them. I did try another sleep aid, a neck collar that emitted electric pulses on my vagus nerves. After five minutes of use, Husband saw me googly-eyed in the chair and asked why I was electrocuting myself and had I completely lost my marbles. “It’s helping,” I said—it wasn’t—it was only making me feel uncomfortable and ridiculous and ripped off. I think I shoved it under the bed.

A cloisonne box on my dresser stored small tokens of various intentions to step up my style, and my subsequent and wholly predictable resistance. Gold conch shell drop earrings made me feel like a walking wind chime. The big pearl earrings which had looked so nice on the saleswoman, the well-dressed one who promised, “You’ll wear them every day!” were worn only once. The whole time I felt like I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t, specifically, the well-dressed saleslady.

There were unopened boxes of eye drops and teeth whiteners, bottles of hair smoothers and hair protectants, a jar of elbow balm, multiple nail files and an exfoliating heel scrubber. And there was me, the owner of those remedies, a frazzled-haired woman with scaly skin and the teeth of a tea drinker.

Did I have unburned incense sticks from a visit to Hindu monastery? Yes. Did I use them to meditate? No. Did I even meditate? Need I answer?

I came to the end of my self-improvement survey. Undoubtedly I earned an F. But only for follow-through. I gave myself an A for intent, and bonus points for the sudden, sweet realization, fifteen years after his death, that I am my father’s daughter.

My dad was ever embarking on self-improvement projects for himself and for his eleven children. You can only coast downhill! read a poster he hung in the basement. The hundreds of books and the range of rotating exercise equipment in our rec room were testaments to his core belief in the possibility of change.

He had books on fixing your eyesight, he had books on learning to draw, how to speed-read, how to stop worrying, many books on how to boost your health with natural cures, and more than one on how to make money writing greeting cards. (Unfortunate irony: he never wrote or sold a greeting card, and macular degeneration eventually robbed him of the ability to read books on eyesight improvement.) His books took up three walls of shelving that went all the way to the ceiling.

He had a rowing machine, exercise mats with illustrations of calisthenics imprinted on them, a mini trampoline, a stationary bike, a small wheel with a handlebar that you rolled out and back, grip strengtheners, and a punching bag. When jogging started becoming popular (before it was recast as running), he bought matching sweatsuits for my mom and himself so they could go jogging together. They jogged around the block and that was the end of it.

None of these purchases changed who he was. None were used very much, if ever, by him. But to me they don’t speak of his failures or his lack of resolve. To me they signal hope, humility, and to borrow a phrase from my brother’s Taekwondo practice, indomitable spirt. In this light I’ll hold up my walnuts and unread books and choose to remain encouraged.

Because aren’t the real failures people who have given up hope of changing? Aren’t the biggest losers people who think they don’t need to change at all?

So here’s to New Year’s resolutions. Once more to the breach, dear friends, once more! Pardon the theatrical switcheroo, but let’s hop on our donkeys, let’s take up our lances and have one more go at the windmills of our imperfections, wobbly and old though we may be.

*

It was inevitable that Don Quixote would come to mind as soon as I started thinking about my dad and his lifelong quest to become a better man. I have memories of him singing, loudly, hammily, “The Impossible Dream” as I played it on the piano. Fighting the unbeatable foe, reaching for the unreachable star—I hear him singing and I can imagine how much he must have identified with the dreamy old knight. Now that I think about it, my dad shared his name/title (Don), and we had a framed Don Quixote print hanging right over the piano.

“The Impossible Dream” has always moved me. You may find it cheesy, especially if you are of my generation and heard it on The Lawrence Welk Show; or you may be too young to have ever heard it at all. Either way, give it a listen. In these crazy, dispiriting times, we need reminders to hope. Play it. Sing along. Thrust open your arms and throw your head to the sky and feel huge and small at the same time, triumphant and sorrowful all at once. Feel the power of your human spirit to carry on.

I’ve listened to every cover of “Impossible Dream” I could find on Spotify. Cher, Elvis, Glen Campbell, Diana Ross, Temptations, Shirley Bassey, Luther Van Dross, Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra, Josh Groban all have their own take on it, some overly dramatic, some not dramatic enough. I’m still partial to the cast recording I grew up with, but second to that, and I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit this, are versions by Andy Williams (his is clean, pure, understated) and goofy Jim Nabors, of all people. What a voice that man had. Best to listen rather than watch him because his mouth movements are distracting.

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In this last month of 2025, I reluctantly admit I will never use these tidbits in a story, novel or essay, so I’m going to do what every down-sizing homeowner does—force my giveaways on others who’ve expressed no interest in having them.

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I’m blind? No, you’re blind

“Women and Dog” by Marisol at the Whitney’s “Sixties Surreal” is a life-size statue featuring women with multiple faces and an actual taxidermized dog head. There’s a lot to take in.

A little girl with coke-bottle glasses walked right up to it and without hesitation, pointed at the first figure and said, loudly, with disbelief, “Four eyes?!”

Now, I don’t mean to heap scorn on the little girl—she was adorable and too young to have ever heard the old-timey nickname for bespectacled people—but it was a telling moment. It goes to show (take your pick)—

1. how unaware we can be of our own limited vision, of the particular lens through which we see the world

2. how experience influences perception

3. how projection is usually at the base of our criticisms of others

It’s like the old joke with the ink blot test. The man being tested says each ink blot looks like a sex act. Depending on the teller of the joke, the 1-2-3 of it (first ink blot, second, and third) can get pretty graphic. Afterward the psychiatrist says, “Sir, you have an obsession with sex.” And the man says, “Me? You’re the one with the dirty pictures!”

The old joke and the young girl are reminders that even when we are convinced we’re right, in fact, especially when we are convinced we’re right, we need to check our biases, the planks in our eyes, which part of the elephant we hold in our fallible hands.

The Daily Stoic writer Ryan Holiday had this to say (he was speaking off the cuff) on a recent podcast about acknowledging our blind spots, staying humble, and acquiring wisdom:

Wisdom isn’t just this acquisition of knowledge and facts. It’s not study and teachers and education. Obviously, that’s part of it. But a big part of it [wisdom] is just keeping that stupid part of yourself in check. The self-awareness to actually put your beliefs up for review, to challenge yourself, to make sure that you’re not falling prey to emotional arguments or cognitive dissonance. . . It’s not just the acquisition of knowledge, but it’s also the removal of foolishness, that is this perpetual battle, especially in this modern world where there’s so many powerful forces and information in play.

. . . Ego can very often learn the very wrong lesson from events that have happened because it filters it through what it wants to be true.

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Choose Your Own Adventure

The rest of this newsletter is called “My Old Anecdotes in Search of a Point.”

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At the drugstore a woman was buying a month’s supply of Preparation H products—tubes of cream and crack wipes. As the clerk bagged the ten or twelve items on the counter he said, “Have a nice evening.”

The point is:

1. Drugstore clerks don’t actually pay attention to what you buy. That is to say, stop worrying—other people are more focused on themselves than on your defects.

2. People behind you in line are paying attention. That is to say, if you need to buy products of a personal nature, go to a drugstore far, far away from your home.

3. Prunes are delicious and helpful!

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Two salesclerks at an upscale home and kitchen wares store discussed inventory. The women, both long past middle-age, had chained reading glasses perched on the bridges of their noses.

“I don’t think people spin their lettuce anymore,” said one woman, slightly aghast.

“I never spun my lettuce,” said the other.

Mic drop.

The point is:

1. Never assume your sacred cows of the past are everyone else’s.

2. Door Dash has taken over America’s kitchens.

3. People these days are eating a lot of dirty lettuce.

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A pot-bellied man at the grocery store wore a t-shirt that read, “Ready for adventure!” But both his shoelaces were untied and clacked on the tile floor with every step he took.

The point is:

1. Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.

2. Hope springs eternal.

3. The human capacity for self-delusion is infinite.

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Grandpa Shorter is an old-fashioned novelty and tchotchke store here in northern Michigan. A disembodied voice from the toy aisle announced, “It seems, sadly, that all the amphibians are in peril.”

The point is:

1. Debbie Downer, my soul sister, lives and breathes in Petoskey, Michigan!

2. If you are standing next to whoopee cushions and wind-up plastic frogs, it’s probably best to avoid pretention.

3. Le frog, c’est moi!

*

The plane was landing, and a mother was struggling to keep her screaming baby from sliding out of her arms onto the floor. The baby desperately wanted to be free. The mother said, raising her voice over the baby’s wailing, “You can’t stand up yet! This is how society functions!”

The point is:

1. Logical arguments rarely convince anyone.

2. Logical arguments never convince babies.

3. Le baby, c’est moi!

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At a charming little bookstore in Chestertown, Maryland, a woman asked the bookseller: “Do you have anything for ‘Mommy lied and Daddy’s really in prison?’”

The point is:

1. Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

2. Honesty is the best policy. For adults. For kids, nothing wrong with Santa Claus and maybe even Daddy-went-to-Australia-for-a-job.

3. Just how old is this anecdote? Couldn’t she have gone online for an answer, asked AI perhaps?

*

Old lady at museum emerges from a small theater after watching an avant-garde short film featuring some grainy, flickering nudity. Rolling her eyes, she said to her companion, “You know how arousing an epileptic seizure is.”

The point is:

1. Old ladies are the best!

2. Old ladies are all the AI we need (Actual Intelligence)!

3. Old ladies are our most precious resource!

*

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“Sixties Surreal,” an exhibit at the Whitney in New York, is by turns funny, disturbing, puzzling. Very little of it is beautiful. Last week as I strolled from room to room, studying and sometimes ignoring sculptures, paintings, collages and short films, thought-provoking art began to merely provoke. At a certain point I had seen enough reproductive organs, exaggerated human forms, scatological references and cartoonish color schemes. I say this not to dismiss the passions and cries for justice that inspired the art—but it all got to be too much strangeness, too much ugliness. When everything startles, you get immune to twitching.

I headed down to the fifth floor and took a breather in a sitting area with an expansive view of the Hudson and Gansevoort Peninsula Park. The trees and cars and kids playing soccer far below were the opposite of surreal; the absence of street noise made the scene on the other side of the glass peaceful and restorative.

On the same floor I saw a Georgia O’Keefe painting from the early 30’s, a close-up of a flowerhead. Nice enough, but nearly colorless and less abstract than the typical O’Keefe. It was the accompanying text that drew me in. O’Keefe explains why she decided to magnify flowers:

“In the twenties, huge buildings sometimes seemed to be going up overnight in New York . . . so I thought I’ll make [flowers] big like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled—they’ll have to look at them. And they did.”

Her intent is clear enough—make “even busy New Yorkers” stop and study what they usually ignore—but that afternoon I misconstrued her words to suit my mood. Here was my takeaway: O’Keefe is offering an antidote to ugliness. She’s neutralizing it. The beauty of her supersized flowers is a counterpoint to the concrete towers of commerce.

As I thought about massive flowers floating over the facades of New York City skyscrapers, covering their windows and scaffolding with velvet petals, a woman I hadn’t thought of in years came into my consciousness. She is midwestern through and through and maybe out of place in the middle of New York City, but there she was by my side at the Whitney, reminding me of her practice of reverse gossip. Whenever someone says something mean about a person not in the room, she provides a counterpoint and says something positive about them. She’s human chemotherapy to ugliness, stopping unkindness from spreading and perhaps even killing it dead.

That should have been the happy end of my New York City experience of surrealism. But the government shutdown had other plans for me.

Our flight home got canceled, so my daughter and I had an evening to kill before our re-scheduled early-morning departure. We decided to go to a comedy club, but we chose poorly. “Welcome to rock bottom,” the emcee joked. Unfortunately it wasn’t a joke. The room smelled of urine and dried beer, the floor was sticky, the temperature so cold we had to keep our coats on, the crowd so sparse we knew we couldn’t leave early without getting called out. A slate of comics tried to extract laughs from the audience with all the joy of ditch diggers. “What are we doing here?’” my daughter and I said to each other, a question that surely has inspired many a surrealist.

For two hours we were trapped in the dark with unfunny people. The comics talked about hating themselves. They talked about hating their jobs. They talked about smoking weed, snorting coke, and having either a penis or a vagina, using cruder terms, as if crudity alone would make their monologues funny. One of them bragged about being a racist. He also used the R word three times and claimed he wanted to kill himself.

Never had New York air tasted cleaner than when at long last we walked up the steps to street level.

At the airport the next day surrealistic tribulations continued. Our 6 a.m. flight got us as far as Chicago, but then we were stuck all day in no-man’s land. Our connecting flight to Traverse City got delayed and delayed and delayed, and with each delay we moved gates and sometimes terminals. We moved five times. We worried we’d eventually get cancelled again. I spent hours sucked into my handheld outrage generator, reading newspapers and watching reels. I had a good book I was too lazy to read. My mood grew worse, more irritable. I was making myself sick with screentime. It was as if I were trapped again in the bleak comedy club basement, and once again, nothing was funny.

In our group of Traverse-City-bound nomads was a lovely woman with whom we shared updates. She had a stylish white bob, glowing skin, a wide smile, and bright, clear eyes. Unlike us she seemed calm, at ease. She told me she was a hospice nurse. Clearly she knew something about patience and perspective.

Occasionally I’d look up from my phone at her face. It was a sunny day and the light seemed always to find her and give her, out of all the hassled passengers around us, a special radiance.

She was the palate cleanser for my doomscrolling. Her very face was an antidote.

Let me come to the point. I am trapped in surrealism. The trap is my phone. The trap is the news cycle, the never-ending siren call of fast-breaking and what is the world coming to. The trap is the supposed moral superiority of paying attention, close, close attention, to cruelty and injustice even as my own pillow is still fluffy—or more accurately because my own pillow is still fluffy. That’s the trap—keep up, keep up, stuff is going down!

The surrealism is that I spend hours, even in the middle of the night, with my trap. The surrealism is that I want to escape and the escape hatch seems so easy to open—just put it down—but I don’t do it. I keep suckling on the poison.

I tell you this with shame. I tell you this because I think most people have some degree of screen addiction and most people dislike themselves for it.

I get advice. Keep your phone in a different room. Use an app to limit your screentime. Stop focusing on things you can’t change. As anyone with a problem behavior knows, someone telling you to just stop doing the problem behavior doesn’t help you stop it.

What does help is Georgia O’Keefe’s words. What does help is an antidote. What does help is thinking about experiences and activities as counterpoints and palate cleansers to the surreal way I interact with my phone. The eyes need a break. The lungs need fresh air. Looking up at the sky helps. Looking down at the earth helps. Art helps. Books help. Kind words help. Kind people help. Any reminder that ugliness, consumerism and cruelty is not the whole of life helps. Any reminder that a real world still exists and the surreal world doesn’t have to steal my attention 24/7, that helps.

And yesterday, punk rocker Patti Smith helped too. In a wonderful interview with Ezra Klein she said this:

“Despite everything that’s happening in the world and everything around us and any frustration or helplessness we feel or betrayal we feel, we have to remember it’s also all right to feel the joy of being alive and feel the joy of your own possibilities. Even in the face of the suffering of so many people around us.”

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Just to be clear . . .

. . . “Sixties Surreal” was nothing like the comedy club basement. The exhibit is worth seeing. There were some wonderful pieces. Two in particular stayed with me, one because of its strange beauty and the other because of its concision and power.

Here’s “If All the World Were Paper, and All the Water Sink” by Jess from 1962. The subject is an apocalypse—notice the nuclear explosion in the back and the lurking stranger in the front—but the brush strokes and colors are gorgeous. Something about it reminds me of Vuillard.

My favorite piece of the day was Unfinished Man by Rupert Garcia from 1968. Here’s the description: “Unfinished Man relies on abstraction to capture the disorienting and jarring experience of a disillusioned soldier reintegrating into an American society roiling with anxiety.” The set of his jaw, the highly edited elements of shapes and color—it was a wow. (If you’re interested in the “roiling anxiety” of America in 1968, I can’t recommend enough the four-part Rest is History podcast series on that year.)

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Final recommendation and you can go about your business

One other thing I can’t recommend enough—the Patti Smith interview with Ezra Klein I mentioned earlier. I love how seriously Smith takes the books she was drawn to in childhood. I love how she talks about being pulled into art in a visceral way. I love her stories of New York City in the 70’s. I love her “rebel hump.” (Still not 100% sure what a rebel hump is, but I’m pretty sure I have one.)

Note: I read the interview rather than listening to it because I wanted to focus on her words, and not have to hear so much from him, as he has a habit of taking over conversations. You have to have a New York Times subscription to read it, but you can listen to it for free.

I’ll pull a few more quotes to give you the flavor of her mind:

“. . . if you get the greatest of poems, it can distill everything like a teardrop. If you’re thirsty and you get that drop of water, it suddenly becomes like a liter of water. Then you’re satisfied. And that’s what a poem can do.”

Talking about the 70’s in West Village, when it was affordable and artists were everywhere and she felt free, she adds—

“But I don’t like painting things like it was the best era ever, so that young people in future generations feel like they missed out. Because that’s not fair. Being alive in present tense is the greatest thing you have.”

And later she reiterates that point:

“New things are being done constantly. New books are being written, new films are being made. And I always pin my faith on youth.”

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On a walk through a desert landscape, Husband points out a solitary flowering weed growing up from inside a rock. There’s not a drop of moisture in the air or on the ground, and none forecasted. The soil, if you can even call it that, is sand and pebbles. “Amazing,” I say.

“That’s why I think the universe is teeming with life,” he says.

“Because—?’

“Because there’s no water here. Because life persists in unlikely circumstances.”

Well. How about that. How about that as a message of hope—

Life persists in unlikely circumstances.

For that very reason I’ve always been a sucker for flowers growing up from under rocks or between cracks in a road. I’ve thought of that phenomenon less as persistence than as the urgent need of living things to live. But I like his formulation. (No surprise, persistence is one of his favorite words. It’s the answer to the question he poses every time he figures out a really tricky programming or mechanical problem: Margaret, do you know how I figured that out?)

Later I ask if I can use the phrase in my newsletter. He hesitates. He wants to clarify. “What I meant was, Look how life establishes itself in hostile conditions.”

He’s talking about life on other planets.

But I’m thinking about life on Planet Earth. I’m thinking about how difficult people’s lives can be here, now. I’m thinking about how many different ways there are for life to be difficult—financial, emotional, physical, mental. And how, whatever the particular solution to those hardships may be, the answer must begin with hope. And how hope allows for grit.

So, once more, with feeling—

Life persists in unlikely circumstances!

But let’s make it punchier—

Life persists!

—and prescriptive—

Persist.

*

Bet your bottom dollar that—tomorrow—

It was not the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the season of colder air and harsh weather, it was the end of fall color. From the window we watched hail and high winds batter the pretty leaves out front, causing them to fall sooner than we wanted.

“We’ll always have yesterday,” my daughter said with a sigh.

Seconds later the hail stopped. The light became golden. A rainbow appeared. A full end-to-end rainbow. Then a double rainbow.

As Fats Waller would say, One never knows, do one?

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